


Resurrect The Living

by fascinationex



Series: harry potter works by fascinationex [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: A lot of dead things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Book 1: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, It's au before we even get to the time travel, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Mental Instability, Minor Character Death, Necromancy, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Slow Burn, Violence, dead things, don't think I can't see you putting spoilers in the bookmarks smh, like very very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-15
Updated: 2019-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-31 16:03:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 19
Words: 48,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13978644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: Circumstance makes Harry an offer he can't refuse.“I can get you the Elixir of Life,” Harry says. “But I need your help with something else.”“You,” says Voldemort, cautious now, wary now that this confrontation hasn’t gone at all like he expects, a little incredulous, “need Lord Voldemort tohelpyou?”Harry looks right past him for a second, jaw tense. “Yeah. You’re the only one who can, apparently.”





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of the prologue that you recognise are taken from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

_Now_ :

“See what I have become?” the face says to him. “Mere shadow and vapour ...I have form only when I can share another’s body... but there have always been those willing to let me into their hearts and minds... Unicorn blood has strengthened me, these past weeks. You saw faithful Quirrell drinking it for me in the Forest... and once I have the Elixir of Life, I will be able to create a body of my own. ...Now, why don’t you give me that Stone?”  
  
The voice is soft and sibilant -- and _strained_.  
  
Harry watches him speak with colder eyes than he ever had when he was eleven. Or fourteen, or fifteen or even seventeen, for that matter. Voldemort is not a man of restrained passions, and Harry can see from Quirrell’s shaking -- for real, now, shoulders hunched against some great weight and muscles trembling with it -- that it’s getting harder and harder to withstand. That’s no surprise. The horcrux he’s supporting is only growing stronger.  
  
“It’s not here,” Harry admits, leaning back against the mirror and sliding his hands into his pockets. “It hasn’t been here all year. I have it, though.”  
  
The red eyes blink. Once, slowly. “Impossible,” hisses Voldemort, and Harry can see how it’s taxing him now, Quirrell’s body heaving with each pause Voldemort takes for breath. Are they sharing lungs? Harry cringes internally. Gross. “Taking it out from under Dumbledore’s nose... is a feat a grown wizard would struggle with.”  
  
“That would have been really hard,” Harry agrees, “but I didn’t take it from Dumbledore, actually.” Truthfully, Dumbledore hadn’t even handled it overmuch, which is a stroke of luck for Harry.  
  
Now’s the hard part. For all that this is what Harry’s been aiming for all bloody year, he still doesn’t feel prepared for it. He still feels like he has no idea what he’s doing. The thing is -- it’s Voldemort. Even though Harry knows exactly how to defeat him and has clear evidence that he _can_ defeat him, Voldemort is the stuff of nightmares.  
  
He bites his lip, but then he straightens up. The decision’s already made. He made it way back.  
  
“I can get you the Elixir of Life,” Harry says. “But I need your help with something else.”  
  
“You,” says Voldemort, cautious now, wary now that this confrontation hasn’t gone at all like he expects, a little incredulous, “need Lord Voldemort to _help_ you?”  
  
Harry looks right past him for a second, jaw tense. “Yeah. You’re the only one who can, apparently.”  
  
Slowly, and with laboured gasps from Quirrell, Voldemort begins to laugh. 


	2. Chapter 2

_Then:_

Hermione is fretting. “It will be different. Time turners let you travel back in the same timeline for short periods, but this is -- this will be completely different, Harry. You'll be in a whole new time line. Do you--?”  
  
“He understands,” says Ron, rolling his eyes. “He’s only heard you say it twelve times.”  
  
"I just want to make sure--"  
  
"Hermione," says Harry, peering into her face. She looks worn. There’s been a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings and sudden lightning strikes of inspiration -- and a lot of her research has been slightly (very) illegal. It’s starting to show under her eyes and around her mouth. She’s not twenty five anymore. “I get it.”  
  
Hermione frowns like she knows he doesn’t get it at all. Her mouth compresses itself into a thin line, but she doesn’t repeat herself.  
  
“I guess this is goodbye,” says Ron, gathering his sprawled limbs and getting up from the couch at last.  
  
"Guess so," Harry agrees, and then there is a long silence, more awkward than anything between them in years.  
  
Harry can almost hear Hermione rolling her eyes.  
  
"Look, just..." A pause. "...if you can, just make sure eleven-year-old me doesn't have to eat Mum’s corned beef sandwiches,” says Ron.  
  
Hermione elbows him. "Of all the things you could ask--"  
  
"What? She means well, but those things are awful. And -- wow, make sure I know I won’t have to fight a troll at the Sorting!” A pause, then, eyes wide: “And _Scabbers_ ,” he adds, raising one arm, waving his hand, suddenly much more animated. “You’ve got to --”  
  
Hermione kicks him in the ankle in a manner Harry does not find particularly discreet.  
  
“Er,” says Ron. He coughs. “I mean. Once you’ve got your... thing... fixed.”  
  
“The hallucinations,” Harry clarifies.

"Right, yeah. Those," Ron says.

“Yeah, I’ll do my best.”  
  
There’s a brief but pointed silence. They all know it’s not just Harry losing touch with reality -- psychotic episodes would have been a lot more manageable at this point.  
  
Ron clears his throat. “Yeah. Those. Well, at least you’ll be able to fix those, right?”  
  
“Er... Yeah,” says Harry. “No problem.”  
  
They look at each other for another short moment. The big grandfather clock in Grimmauld Place is loud in the silence between them.  
  
“Oh, Harry,” Hermione says in a shaking voice. She sweeps in for another crushing hug.  
  
It’s not a dramatic send off, but if Harry only gets this one goodbye to remember his friends by, this’ll do.

* * *

  
  
There’s three things you have to understand.  
  
Firstly, there is a good reason the Gaunts have been holding on to the resurrection stone for generations. It’s not because of the good character of their house, and it’s not because they even really know what it does.  
  
Secondly, there are no empty titles in the Wizarding World. Even the stupidest ones mean something. Harry used to think of the whole 'master of death’ thing as a bit of a ‘you united three unspeakably powerful objects, congratulations’ sort of ceremonial acknowledgement. It isn’t.  
  
Thirdly: Harry Potter is losing his mind. 

* * *

  
  
It starts with a voice nobody else can hear, a plaintive, high pitched ‘I didn’t do it.’ It is soft enough to be difficult to hear, and pitched just right to be grating over time.  
  
There is a girl, seven or eight, in tiny elegant robes with stains all over her small, flexible fingers. Her head is stuck at a questioning tilt, and she can’t seem to turn it; when she turns, her whole body moves in time with her attention.  
  
She isn’t a ghost -- at least, not one like Harry has ever seen. Her movements are jerky and unconscious, and she repeats herself over and over like she has no real sense of continuity. She is faded and half-real, but she has none of the shining pearly glow Harry associates with actual ghosts. She is a strange, wan child with no colour to her.  
  
Harry speaks with her sometimes, first because she is new and he doesn’t know what she is doing there, and then subsequently because he wants to stop her high whining voice from repeating itself over and over.  
  
She clearly sees Harry. She learns his name, slowly and with difficulty, asking over and over  until she seemed to have it down -- and then she forgets it. forgets him. Every time Harry leaves, he comes back and has to meet her all over again.  
  
And... nobody else can see her. Not Ron and not Hermione. Not Kreacher, either.  
  
Ron and Hermione are worried.  
  
“You’re probably not ‘losing your mind’,” Hermione says slowly. She does a lot of complicated checking around the ghost she can’t see, firing spell after spell, bringing in a Sneakoscope (‘Just in case, Harry,’ she explains, although in case of _what_ remains mysterious), dragging a whole host of odd equipment to Grimmauld Place to test.  
  
“Fine. I’m not losing my mind,” Harry says flatly, “I’m just -- seeing and hearing things nobody else does.”  
  
"You did that all through fifth year," says Ron placidly.  
  
Hermione shoots him a look that seems to say ‘accurate, not helpful’, and he shrugs. “What about in our second year,” she suggests, “with the basilisk? You were hearing things then, weren't you? It’s not always one thing or the other with magic, there’s probably a perfectly reasonable explanation somewhere--”  
  
“Which she’s going to find,” says Ron.  
  
“--Which I’m going to find,” she agrees.  
  
The perfectly reasonable explanation is that Harry is _going nuts._ Honestly, it’s probably about time. Between actually dying, having a piece of Voldemort’s soul stuck in his head, utterly failing to learn Occlumency from Snape in the most unpleasant way possible, half his graduating class dying -- any one of several things might have pushed him a little ‘round the twist.  
  
“Well. This isn’t a snake, is it?" he points out instead of saying that. He glances at Ron and wonders if he also should point out that it certainly isn’t the horcrux in his head, either. That thing’s long gone.  
  
Ron meets his glance, shrugs again easily, and then occupies himself with a chocolate frog. “I bet this one’s going to be you again,” he says. “Why’s your card so common?”  
  
Hermione ignores this complaint. "I don’t mean that it’s literally a snake. Even in the wizarding world, there are skills that are more or less common. Just because you can see something that Ron or I can’t see doesn’t mean it’s not real," she says.  
  
Harry is of a mind that yes, actually, it probably does mean exactly that it isn’t real.  
  
Hermione ploughs on: “You united all of the Hallows."  
  
Harry slumps back against the backrest of his hair. This sounds like clutching at straws to him. "You really believe that capital-D Death went around to three guys and handed out magical cloaks and wands and -- and _rocks_?"  
  
"Of course not.” She rolls her eyes. “That part’s mostly publicity, I expect. But there's no denying that the Hallows are powerful magic, Harry. And they've all got power over aspects of death. That means something."  
  
Harry makes a dubious noise, but he doesn’t refute it outright.  
  
He does catch Ron’s chocolate frog when it makes an unexpected bid for freedom. “Here.” He passes it back, and then sticks one finger into his mouth. The residue is sweet.  
  
“Cheers. Hey, look, it’s Dumbledore. Haven’t seen his card in years.”  
  
Harry glances over. _Albus Dumbledore, 1881-1997_. Dragons’ blood, alchemy, instrumental to the defeat of two dark wizards. Dumbledore has a pretty fierce resume, really. The card’s text about chamber music and ten pin bowling ended up removed in later years to make room for more information about his work against Voldemort -- honestly, Harry thinks he’d probably have rather they kept the part about his hobbies. That’s the sort of information Dumbledore would have found relevant.  
  
Harry’s eyes drift away again. Dumbledore never really believed in the concept of impossibilities. “We can check,” he relents, watching the old man twinkle up at him from the photograph on his card.  
  
Hermione nods, but absently. Harry suspects that his agreement is really very irrelevant to her research plans here.  
  
They test it. Harry sits with the little girl ghost that only he can see and asks her questions, slowly and carefully. It’s like trying to get blood from a rock: she gives half answers, she forgets what they’re talking about mid-sentence, she drifts off on confused tangents. Sometimes she forgets they’re talking at all and starts making those high, sad noises again, I _didn’t do it, I didn’t do it._  
  
Armed with a slightly disturbing transcript, Hermione goes off to do battle with the Ministry records room. She takes Harry with her -- and, after a moment of squinting at him where he’s gorging himself on chocolate frogs on Harry’s couch, makes Ron come along too. He protests vocally, but he never once makes any indication that he isn’t going along. Neither of them is very good at research, but they can fetch and carry and, when the stars align, actually read some of the records and report back.  
  
They spend the morning picking through obituaries and Wizengamot history, and then Harry has to go to a St Mungo’s event to help them drum up charity.  
  
“Rather stay here,” he says, when Ron gives him the ‘please take me with you’ eyes.  
  
“I don’t blame you,” says Hermione, from somewhere behind a stack of records. He can just see the top of her bushy hair peeking out. “But you really shouldn’t cancel on St Mungo’s. They need all the donations they can get.”  
  
Harry knows she’s right, but he still pulls a face. He’s become the go-to celebrity endorsement for worthy causes these days -- the idea seems to be that if _Harry Potter_ tells you to donate, well, you know it’s a good, morally-sound cause. St Mungo’s is always one of the easier ones, honestly. Nobody has any questions about the validity of the cause, or whether or not they need money.  
  
It’s a good thing, but it still makes him sort of tired. Sometimes he wishes he’d stayed in the Auror corps, even if that was not what he wanted in the end.  
  
Ron shows up alone by Floo in the receiving room of Grimmauld Place later that day, after Harry has come home and blinked the flash photography out of his eyes and put himself down for a nap.  
  
Kreacher keeps candles burning all around, floating in the air above their heads in little groups. They render the otherwise gloomy room surprisingly bright, despite its lack of windows. It still has the smell in the air of an old place that never gets much daylight. Everything does, in this ancient and crumbling house.  
  
“Harry!” he calls, “Harry!” And when Harry shuffles in eventually, he continues: “Well, you’re not making it up. Hermione’s still buried under a pile of books, but --” he pauses. “Is she still here?”  
  
“Hermione?” Harry squints, cleaning his glasses on his jumper. “No? What?”  
  
“What?” Ron parrots. Then, “Wha-- on, no, the -- the ghost. Did I wake you up?”  
  
“Er... no, of course not.” Harry isn’t sure if he should admit to sleeping in the middle of the afternoon like an eighty year old.  
  
From the way his expression changes and the smile that plays around the edge of his mouth, Ron is not fooled in the slightest.  
  
Harry tilts his head, listening for the sound. The ghost haunts the kitchen primarily, but sometimes she also walks up the stairs -- in exactly the same pattern, feet in the same footsteps, over and over. After a second, he hears the high pitched voice, soft and mumbling: ‘I didn’t do it.’  
  
“Yeah,” he sighs. “She’s still here.”  
  
Ron turns around, as though he can find the ghost if he only tries hard enough -- which isn’t likely, since she isn’t even in the room with them. Harry watches him squint around suspiciously for a few seconds.  
  
Finally, Ron shoves his hand into his pocket and fishes out a crumpled piece of parchment. “I found the obituary and a couple of reports.”  
  
Harry eyes the parchment. Ron might have found the information, but it’s obvious that Hermione wrote the note. It’s summarised in dot points and meticulously organised. Ron’s handwriting, and his ability to organise information on paper, isn’t something he’s worked on much since they graduated. Hermione’s writing is narrow and precise.  
  
The information fills in the confused holes in the ghost’s interview -- Tucana Black, who stabbed her little brother and whose mother pushed her down the stairs three days later. The mother had gotten a comparatively light sentence for killing a child.  
  
“That explains her neck,” Harry says.  
  
Ron shifts on his heels. “Right,” he agrees. “Well, Hermione’s going to look into it -- why you can see her, if we can’t.”  
  
“All right.” Harry is capable of doing his own research, but in some cases it is better to let Hermione take the reins. She is better at it and she won’t look kindly on interference or unrequested ‘help’.  
  


* * *

  
  
"I found it," says Hermione, two weeks later, "but you're not going to like it."  
  
And as usual, Hermione is right. He doesn’t.  
  
It is absolutely the Hallows.  
  
They’re bound to Harry now, as the master of the Hallows themselves if not the master of death. Between that, his impromptu trip to King’s Cross after Voldemort shot the Killing Curse at him again, and his own ancestry, somehow circumstances have conspired against him.  
  
Of course they have, because this is how Harry lives.  
  
Harry is hypersensitive to death. To... to dead things. To the echoes left by those dead who really have departed.  
  
And that’s what the ghosts are. Echoes of real people long gone, little imprints stuck in space and time with limited means of interaction, even with the magical world. But now Harry can see them and hear them.  
  
“There was supposed to be a way to fix it,” Hermione admits, “but I think it’s pretty much lost.” She gives him a helpless look.  
  
Figures. “Tell me what you learnt?”  
  
She does. It transpires that the children of Cadmus Perevell are the only ones who inherit the family gift for death magic. And it, like parseltongue, is innate -- it’s inborn, not learned. Supposedly, anyway, although Hermione seems inclined to believe it's more like a family secret than a genetic trait.  
  
It's hard to ask, since the whole family is dead.  
  
“They died with Voldemort,” Harry guesses.  
  
“I’m afraid so.” Hermione’s lips twist. “I’ll keep looking, but, Harry, they weren’t a very strong line. They inbred like mad, trying to keep their blood ‘pure’. ...I don’t expect they’d have been much help, honestly,” she admits. “By all accounts they were horrid.”  
  
Harry rubs his forehead. “Yeah,” he mumbles.  
  
But he can’t help but wish the Gaunt line still existed in some form somewhere. Enough for him to at least _ask_.

* * *

  
It gets worse  
  
Harry hears the whispers all the time now, mostly soft and indistinct, but occasionally single voices stand out.  
  
He hears ‘Do you think Maggie left the oven on again?’ in an old and trembling voice, or ‘I knew that filthy slag moved right on --’ or ‘Come out of the rain, Leon, you’ll catch your death like that.’  
  
They drift in and out of prevalence like a poorly tuned radio. Sometimes they’re faint and fuzzy, and sometimes they’re so real and loud and immediate that he spins around and looks for the speaker.  
  
He starts staying home, but Grimmauld Place isn’t much better than anywhere else. He and Hermione got the elf heads off the wall years ago -- it was grizzly job and he remembers it very clearly -- so he knows to ignore those vile shapes when they reappear one day, colourless and oddly translucent.  
  
It’s just... harder to ignore when they start actively berating Kreacher.  
  
"That isn't being how Master Orion takes his tea!" screams one at the top of her lungs. Harry assumes 'her' because she’s wearing earrings made out of broken copper nibs, but Harry is no expert on elfish fashion.  
  
Harry turns to Kreacher, never even twitches one of his huge batlike ears at the noise. He mustn’t hear it.  
  
"So-- Orion Black," he says, a bit later. "Did he take his tea weak with a slice of lemon?"  
  
Kreacher, ever-grumpy thing, takes some time to mutter about why it might be relevant to Harry. Harry waits him out, as he always does. In the end he says yes, Master Orion is taking his tea exactly like that.  
  
Real, then -- for a given value of real, which at this point merely means he’s not actively hallucinating. Harry rubs his forehead. He can’t feel his scar anymore. The lightning bolt on his forehead is just an unpigmented bit of skin now, nearly invisible to the eyes unless you’re looking for it. Sometimes Harry misses it, sort of -- not what it symbolises, not the horcrux. But sometimes it feels like everything is changing too fast and even that familiarity, horrible though it was, would be nice.  
  
“Thanks, Kreacher," he mumbles, much to Kreacher's distaste.


	3. Chapter 3

Just because all the Gaunts are dead doesn’t strictly mean Harry can’t talk to them.

“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea,” Hermione tells him in a cautious tone that means that’s exactly what she’s saying. “I’m just saying that if uniting the Hallows is what’s causing the problem, then _using_ them might well just make it worse.”

’…ow did they even discover frogs’ legs were edible?’ asks a voice distantly, dropping in and out like it can’t quite hit the right frequency. Harry shakes his head, but it doesn’t change.

“It’s not exactly getting better on its own,” he points out.

Hermione’s expression turns frustrated: bitten lip, furrowed brow. She taps the broad wooden table rapidly with her fingertips. “Give me a few days,” she says finally. “There’s no point calling up Voldemort or Marvolo or somebody if we don’t have to. There’s bound to be _somebody_ in that line who wasn’t…” She trails off, peering at Harry for a long moment. “Well.”

He sighs. “Yeah, I know. They were all mental, too.”

Like him. He doesn’t say it, but it hangs unsaid between them.

“Not ‘too’. And… No,” she says firmly, after that telling pause, “just bigoted and awful. They weren’t - like _this_.”

That much, at least, is true. It’s not actually comforting.

“I’ll look into it.”

Gawaine Gaunt doesn’t look much like a 'Gawaine’ should, according to Harry’s imagination, but he looks rather a lot like a Gaunt - which is a bit of a pity for him, really.

He isn’t thrilled to be drawn back past the veil to discuss the problems of the living.

“It’s rude, is what it is,” he says, sitting primly upon the heavy, clawed couch in the parlour at Grimmauld Place. Harry’s not sure how the business of sitting down even works, since he certainly isn’t solid enough to interact with other objects.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” Harry tells him. “I wouldn’t have summoned you if there was somebody else to ask.”

Gawaine sniffs. Despite being too tall and quite underfed-looking, with his sneering mouth and spindly fingers, he has the same compelling dark eyes that Harry remembers Tom Marvolo Riddle as having at sixteen - before his experiments turned them red.

It is an uncomfortable comparison.

“Well,” he says sourly, “it’s obvious that you need all the help you can get, so I won’t begrudge you. But I don’t want to see you again after this nonsense, do you understand me, Mister- Black, is it?” He nods to one of the hangings on the wall, which does of course include the Black family crest. Harry hasn’t really redecorated much, aside from getting rid of the things that are actively gross or dangerous.

“Er,” Harry shakes his head. “Potter.”

“Potter! My word, things certainly have changed. Good blood, even if they’re not-” he lets the sentence hang there. “Well, I suppose they’re a distant relation.”

 _Very_ distant, Harry hopes. He nods anyway.

Gawaine is cold. Harry notices immediately because he radiates it. He doesn’t bring it up, but within fifteen minutes he can see his own breath in the air. Gawaine looks lively enough, relative solidity not withstanding. But he is icy. The windows fog over rapidly as the temperature inside the townhouse drops so far below the relative warmth of London outside.

Harry shoves his hands into his pockets.

“Well,” Gawaine says, after Harry explains and they all come around to the point, “yes, there’s certainly magic for hypersensitivity to death - a potion, in fact.”

Harry winces internally, and tries quite hard to keep the expression from showing. He hates making potions. He’s never been very good at it. Even if Snape hadn’t been an awful teacher - and he was, even to the students he didn’t loathe - Harry hasn’t the aptitude.

Gawaine is still talking. “Anyone silly enough to actually use the resurrection stone ought to take it, of course, but to unite all of the Hallows - and to have parted the veil with your own hands, to have survived the Killing Curse twice, been a receptacle for another’s soul -” he makes a cringing face, all tight around the eyes. “You poor, _stupid_ young man. You must have it made posthaste. However, I must stress that it’s not really designed for… well, I’m certain the potion will _help_ , but it might not fix it entirely. With regard to death magic you seem to have,” he pauses delicately, “rather an embarrassment of riches.”

“Er, right,” says Harry. “But you know how to make the potion -?”

“Oh, of course -”

“Great!” Harry whips out a self-inking quill and a roll of parchment, prepared to take notes with a speed not seen at any point during his entire scholastic career, “So-”

“-although I’m afraid that won’t help you much.”

Harry stops. Stills. “Er… It won’t?”

“Certainly not. If you’ve summoned me from beyond the veil, it follows that there are no other wizards of Cadmus Perevell’s line to ask - or that they won’t speak to you. The recipe’s useless without one of us to brew it.”

Harry eyes Gawaine uncertainly.

That sounds a lot like pureblood rubbish. And the Gaunts were big on pureblood rubbish, he knows that much.

“Erm, maybe I could get the recipe anyway?” he asks cautiously.

Gawaine tilts his head. “If you wish.”

Harry does wish. He takes the instructions down, repeats every item and bores Gawaine Gaunt halfway to tears with his double-checking.

It is a very old-fashioned potion, rather like the sort of concoction one might find in the references in _Moste Potente Potions_. It has a distinct air of that old-school renaissance investment in classical Greek scholarship about it, and Harry half expects Gawaine to begin rambling about his black bile and phlegmatic humours.

He doesn’t. They double and triple-check the potion and Harry thanks him sincerely and sends him on his way with a promise not to summon his spirit again. Gawaine is very proper about the whole thing but does not, strictly speaking, seem that bad. Which is weird, because Harry expects Voldemort’s great-great grand-uncle to be pretty evil, all up.

Hermione looks it over when she arrives, hours later, trailing Ron through the Floo. Her brow furrows as she skims the roll of parchment. “Harry, I don’t like this. The only potions that call for human blood are really dark magic.”

“Yeah,” says Ron, “and right, up til now, he’s been a pillar of the magical community, all talking to snakes and horcruxes and master of death-”

Hermione makes an indignant noise.

“Besides,” he adds, slumping down at the rickety kitchen table and kicking out a chair for her, too, “we used blood all the time in potions class.”

“Not _human_ blood. And this calls for - it wants a whole pint of human blood. Voldemort’s resurrection potion didn’t even use that much-”

“Not calling for anybody’s bones or their whole bloody hand, though, is it?” Ron mutters. Then, louder, “It doesn’t say you have to kill anybody to get it. It’s not like it’s unicorn blood.”

Harry remains quiet between them. He isn’t entirely sure which side he’s on here, doesn’t feel all that thrilled by Ron waving about this 'master of death’ nonsense so casually, and is distracted by a disembodied voice reading aloud a newspaper report from eighteen sixty three.

Finally, he looks up. “Hypothetically,” he interrupts, ignoring the confusing interjection of somebody cheerfully remarking upon the opening of the new London Underground Railway, “do you think it’d work?”

Hermione sighs. “I don’t think there’s much to this nonsense about it having to be the Gaunt family, if that’s what you mean. I don’t see any _real_ problem as long as the blood’s donated willingly,” she adds with a very pointed look at Ron, who makes a face, “but it’s still pretty dark magic.”

“Yeah, well,” mutters Harry, pulling his glasses off and rubbing his face, “that seems to keep happening around me.”

He misses her sympathetic look, too busy trying to pick out the correct parts of reality. What sounds are happening in his kitchen right now, and what sounds are wrong? Somewhere, somebody begins talking earnestly about scarlet fever.

 _Shut up_ , he thinks, setting his forehead on the table. He misses, too, the glances Ron and Hermione exchange over his head _. Shut up!_

* * *

Still, it gets worse.

Ministry functions are always bad, because it isn’t like Harry can afford to avoid them. The Daily Prophet whips itself into a frenzy every time, and each headline is stupider and more sensationalist than the last: Potter is absent because he’s dying. Potter is absent because he’s secretly a Death Eater apologist and doesn’t respect the lives lost in the war. Potter and/or his invented partner is pregnant. Potter’s finally cracked under the stress of trauma. Potter’s finally getting married. It goes on and on.

Chiefly Harry’s problem is the Prophet and its journalists, actually, and they’re usually one of his best reasons for non-attendance, but only Xeno Lovegood ever prints the rude things Harry says about the Daily Prophet - and Xeno Lovegood prints a lot of other garbage, too. Harry knows he’s seen at least one article somewhere in the Quibbler that says he’s secretly Albus Dumbledore under polyjuice.

Whatever ridiculous excuse they might have made up for his absence, by showing up Harry confirms beyond all doubt that he’s not doing well. He wonders if that’s the right decision in the end.

The modern ministry probably doesn’t understand how much death the whole building - the whole location - is steeped in.

“You’re staring past me,” hisses Ron, in a manner he probably thinks is helpful.

“Yeah. Well. There’s a man behind you and his stomach’s cut,” Harry points out, trusting in Hermione’s privacy spell. “He wants somebody to put his stomach back in, I think.”

“…Gross,” mutters Ron, peering nervously over his shoulder.

“You can’t see him,” say Hermione and Harry in unison; Harry wearily, Hermione with an edge of exasperation.

Ron tilts his head in that way he does when he wants to say something, knows he probably shouldn’t say it, and is definitely going to say it anyway. “You’re sure this is, er, death stuff? You’re not just… you know…?”

“What, bonkers?”

“Well. Yeah.”

The person behind Hermione whispers to him, looking half-crazed, clutching the ragged edges of the gash in his belly. Harry can’t understand whatever language he’s speaking, but the meaning seems clear. A splash of blood so dark it’s almost black hits the floor, and if Harry didn’t know he was the only one who could see it -

The apparition speaks again, and Harry still doesn’t understand him. It’s not a spell, not magic at all: it’s just, Harry doesn’t speak whatever that is. Italian? Spanish?

“It’s definitely death stuff,” says Harry. He’s doing his best to ignore it, but honestly, he doubts that his brain would be able to come up with something like this on his own. He thinks that the ghosts of his own mind would be - familiar. People he’s lost. Old deaths. Dumbledore, maybe. Or Fred. Remus Lupin. Even Snape, maybe. Not like _this_.

The dead man opens his washed-out, pallid mouth and whatever he’s saying seems to drift through the air, repeating and echoing and filling Harry’s head until it rings like a bell.

To Ron he adds, feeling quite distant and detached from his own buzzing limbs: “But there’s no reason it can’t be both.”

The man yells now, loudly enough that Harry flinches.

Bloody hell.

Harry rubs one ear. “He’s loud,” he mutters. It has no impact on the man, who is, after all, not a whole person. He’s a lingering echo, not a real ghost, and he isn’t complex enough to be offended by his rudeness.

He stares at Harry intently over his friends’ shoulders, like there is something he ought to be doing to help.

Finally Harry makes the mistake of looking at him directly. He opens up the jagged slit across his belly, revealing soft slippery innards - and worse, the cavity where they definitely should be. Harry can see the ghostly gleam of a rib. He thinks, briefly, dizzily, that he can smell him - red and raw like newly ground meat.

Harry’s stomach turns.

“What?”

Harry looks back at Ron. “What?”

“Ignore it,” says Hermione firmly.

Sound advice, but it’s easier said than done.

“Yeah, sure. I’ll just… ignore him.”

He follows him all night, past the wan and weary ghosts of older wars, screaming incomprehensibly.

He ignores him as much as he can, but he’s still pretty sure the gossip sections are going to report him as twitchy and nervous. He wonders what that will look like in print.

In the end, Ron and Hermione abscond with him. They cite the anniversary of somebody’s death to Shacklebolt’s new aide to facilitate their getaway. Harry doubts they’ll get away with so sympathetic a rumour.

“Abusing Orgasmia,” predicts Ron cheerily, helping him out of the grate back at Grimmauld Place. “ _Harry Potter: Orgasmia Addict_ , continued page 2.”

“If the Prophet prints that we’ll have a worse epidemic on our hands,” says Hermione, actually looking worried for a second. “Sorry,” she adds, glancing at Harry, “but it’s true.”

“I’m heading in to Hogwarts next week to tell the kids about it,” Ron admits, looking briefly uncomfortable. “Big campaign. You know how it is - 'JUST SAY NO TO O, KIDS,’ and all that rubbish. Well-” he pauses, “if McGonagall agrees. Can’t see why she wouldn’t, though.”

“It’s not rubbish, it’s -”

“It’s a stupid campaign. There’s nobody at Hogwarts under eleven, you can’t give teenagers cartoon dementors and rhyming songs, they’ll think you’re trying too hard.”

“It’s… maybe it’s a little patronising, but the campaign’s necessary.” Hermione says, and now she prods Harry into a seat. “Kreacher,” she says after a hesitant pause, “do you think maybe - would it be too much trouble to have some tea for Harry?”

“He’s a house elf, Hermione,” sighs Ron, flopping down upon the settee. “That’s what he does.” As if to verify Ron’s comment, a tea service appears with a resounding _crack_. There’s only two cups upon it.

Hermione twitches, and then, in her sweetest voice, says: “Thank you, Kreacher.”

“Anyway, McGonagall still hasn’t given us the go-ahead.”

“Does she have to?” Harry asks, ignoring the ghostly girl wandering down the steps with her neck at the wrong angle. He can hear her muttered protests, but he knows what they are and he has grown adept at tuning her out now.

“Yeah, well, plenty of people around still remember what happened the last time the Ministry tried to interfere at Hogwarts, don’t they? They’re taking a hands off approach in case they get lynched. I don’t think it’ll be a problem, though, she’d be daft to make a fuss over something this small…”

“Probably because she doesn’t want _any_ of us back there.” Harry’s mouth twists into a tiny curve, soothed by the normalcy of the conversation despite the long night. He waves vaguely at the tea pot and it pours. “The school barely survived the first time, and that was with Dumbledore.”

Ron makes a snorting noise that might be diplomatically interpreted as laughter.

“That’s true,” murmurs Hermione, more thoughtful than amused.

They leave after a cup of tea, and Harry goes to bed that night with the feeling that things are - bad, certainly, but not insurmountable. He doesn’t like leaning so heavily on Hermione and Ron for support, but he feels like they can and will help when he needs them.

Harry has spent a lot of time in his life trying not to depend upon anybody, so that feeling is …precious to him.

The next morning, the paper says he’s clearly abusing sleeping draughts, and should know better.

“Could be worse,” says Harry, folding it back up.

“I didn’t do it,” murmurs the ghost in the kitchen, voice almost lost to the dusty hush of Grimmauld Place.

“Yeah, I hear you,” sighs Harry, returning to his breakfast.

This is bad. But he’s lived through worse. And there’s still the potion to try.


	4. Chapter 4

The potion does nothing. 

Harry tries brewing it first, and when he fails he assumes it’s because he is awful at brewing potions. 

Hermione’s doesn’t work either. 

“Maybe it does need the right kind of blood?” Harry asks her. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says firmly. “That ‘my blood’s different from your blood’ nonsense is just pureblood propaganda.”

Hermione tries three different permutations of it. 

None work. 

None of them even give him horrible side effects. 

Hermione tries three charms, one of which makes him hallucinate snakes and two of which do nothing except make him sleepy. She makes four different alternative potions, which all _do_ have moderately horrible side effects, and she seethes about her failures. 

"If Snape was still alive," she mutters abortively. She says this while fretfully hovering outside the loo as Harry vomits up everything he's ever eaten and all the restless ghosts in London scream inside his skull.

When he finally comes up for air, Harry takes a single deep breath, filling his lungs for what feels like the first time in weeks, and spits bile into the toilet bowl. Then he rubs one hand through his sweaty hair. "If Snape was still alive," he croaks at her, "he'd refuse to help on principle."

From her face, she sort of agrees with him, but she elects not to speak ill of the dead. 

And... That makes sense, considering how many of them there are. Especially lately.

Harry goes back to vomiting. 

Ron is prosaic, although they don’t really consult him on the process directly -- he’s at least as poor a brewer as Harry. “I’m not saying the pureblood stuff is right, exactly,” he says as a preface. 

They’re sitting in the kitchen at Grimmauld Place, having followed Harry back early from lunch at The Burrow. The Weasley family leaves reasonably friendly ghosts behind, but there’s more than one backyard broomstick accident out on their property. There’s sunlight streaming through the window, Kreacher sulking around the edges of the room and complaining about guests in the kitchen, and a ghost trying to touch Harry’s hair with her icy, broken fingers. 

Hermione’s lips thin out, and her expression is the distilled essence of _be very careful what you say next_. Harry sort of wishes he could be that clear without ever opening his mouth. 

“I’m just saying, some magical talents really are confined to a family - you don’t get metamorphmagi outside of about three pureblood families, and you know parselmouths are only part of Slytherin’s direct line, that sort of thing.”

“There’s a family in Rome who can talk to goats,” Hermione says. 

“...Er,” says Ron. 

“I read about it,” she continues, resting her forehead on the table top with her dark curling hair spilling all over, “in--”

“Right, of course you did,” Ron interrupts, and she doesn’t even lift her head to glare at him. “So some things _are_ only passed down in some families.”

“Wouldn’t we know if Voldemort had had any particular skill with the dead?” Hermione wonders plaintively. 

Ron opens his mouth, no doubt to make a completely tasteless comment about how, _well, obviously Voldemort was pretty good at making people dead, so,_ and Harry kicks him in the ankle. He shrugs and closes his mouth again. 

“He did, though,” Harry says into the pause. “I mean, he was really good -- better than Grindelwald, supposedly, even -- at raising Inferi.”

Hermione raises her head. “Well, that’s just, really perfect, isn't it-- what are we supposed to do if we do need blood from the family?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Harry wonders. 

They stare at the table for a long time. It offers no answers. 

“I didn’t do--”

“Would you _shut up_?” Harry snarls at Tucana. She stares back at him, undeterred.

“Er,” says Ron. “Harry.”

“I know,” says Harry, turning back to him. Hermione doesn’t even look slightly surprised. “You can’t see her, she’s not there. I know.”

“She’s there,” sighs Hermione.

“She’s real. Great.”

“Well, she is.”

“Not helpful,” Harry says shortly, and they descend again into unhappy silence. 

“Do we know if it’s really extinct in the female line?” Ron asks finally. 

“Yes,” says Hermione. She doesn’t look up. She has checked, because of course she has. 

“Bugger,” mutters Ron. 

* * *

It gets worse.

The longer it goes on, the more he sees of them. There are just so many dead in London -- and forget London, there are so many dead just in this _house_. 

He makes Kreacher move his bed, because although the bed has been replaced, its position in the room hasn’t changed in centuries. Bed is a natural place to die, but Harry cannot handle the possibility of waking up next to anymore deathly ill, haughty Blacks.

The bottom of the stairs makes sense as well, but he knows for certain Astrid Black was pushed. She’s much too young to fall and break her neck like that - and on reflection, the angle doesn’t even make sense for a tumble. Who falls, backwards, down the stairs? Nobody, that’s who. He thinks of Tucana. Maybe pushing people down the stairs is a time honoured Black tradition.

The weirdest thing about them is that they don’t even really seem to interact. If he points one ghost out to the other they focus on one another and become, briefly, more lively. They even seem to know each other -- Astrid being Tucana’s great aunt, technically. But if he leaves them to it, they just wander around, mangled by their respective falls, and occasionally tell him things, soft and disjointed. 

Sometimes Astrid watches him while he’s trying to sleep, and when he opens his eyes she reaches out to him. 

Her hands always go through him with an icy chill, but he wonders what she’d do if they didn’t. 

In October (because what terrible thing doesn’t happen in October?) Harry leaves Grimmauld Place to get milk. He knows he can leave it to Kreacher, of course, but he’s been days trapped inside the house and he feels like he’ll drown if he doesn’t go outside sooner or later. It’ll take him two blocks to get milk, and it’ll come in a carton of treated muggle cardboard, and Kreacher will throw a fit. It’ll be good, normal.

Harry trips over a ghost on his doorstep. 

Then he looks out onto the street. 

They’re everywhere. The dead of London, parading through the streets. The bitumen is black and the sky is overcast and grey and the houses are all tall and narrow -- it’s all very familiar. But all about the familiar setting are people laying immobile on the street, or walking quickly to go somewhere, or standing around. It’s... crowded.

London is a city of deep history - and much of it is violent. There have been battles, there have been bombings. There are people who have been reduced to a spray of blood on the breeze. Those people aren’t really Harry’s concern, of course, but there are plenty who died unable to get up and walk away -- and those are a problem. 

There are ones who watch everyone, people and ghosts alike, and they grasp at people and other dead creatures who pass them -- and upon Harry, their grips are... they’re cold, and by now they’re almost real.

Suddenly he feels like he can smell them, like it’s not a trick his brain plays when he sees grizzly mortal injuries, but a real and _really bad_ smell. He covers his nose and mouth with one hand, trying desperately to think of an air filtering spell. He knows there must be one, he’s just -- he’s never used one. Bubble Head Charm? Maybe? But, no, that won’t stop smells.

Distantly, he thinks he’ll have to find and learn a filtering charm.

A greying bypasser in a tan coat gives him an odd look, shoves his hands in his pockets and keeps walking.

... is that man alive? His isn’t the only set of eyes that catches on Harry. As Harry watches, frozen on his stoop, the man steps over one of the bodies, flashing a strip of red beneath his coat.  
Harry doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know. 

He takes a deep breath, ignores the smell, and steps out. He just needs to get to the shop and buy a carton of milk. He can do that much, and if he can’t he may as well off himself now. 

A hand snatches at his ankle as he goes. Harry pulls his foot away, pulls it through the half-there grip. It feels like dragging his shoe through cold honey.

It’s a lot realer than Astrid Black’s icy touch. 

He knows to avoid their hands after that. Purposefully, he picks his way through. 

He just wants a bloody carton of milk. 

* * *

It goes on.  

It feels like it’s getting worse. Still. Somehow.

They year ends with Harry increasingly known as a batty recluse -- usually thought by the papers to be drowning in illegal potions. He finds his face trotted out by the Daily Prophet on every slow news day. Rumours echo through papers and the wireless, through word of mouth. No wonder, they say, he faced the Killing Curse twice. Strange that it didn’t happen earlier!

Sometimes Harry kind of agrees with them.

Sometimes - increasingly often - he even wants to leave his house but he just can’t. He can’t stomach it, can’t breathe through it, can’t contemplate stepping outside without a slick shiver of sweat on his spine. Sometimes he makes himself do it anyway -- but exposure never makes it better. It just makes the dead look more real. 

Ron hovers, and awkward and semi-comforting shadow showing up at odd times and offering massive pots of tea and an astonishing variety of Molly’s homegrown platitudes.

Hermione, on the other hand, begins to act almost aggressively normal -- so much so that it sometimes seems like Ron’s the one trying to reign her in, to stop her being so obviously insensitive. She takes his _Hermione, no_ , expressions like a challenge and perseveres without even breaking stride.

Of course, eventually even Ron and Hermione get sick of trying to help him cope -- roughly about the same time that Harry realises he’s exchanged all of his coping methods for... not coping. 

“Right,” says Hermione, banging a huge tome down upon his kitchen table. Her eyes are flinty and her mouth is grim. “I’ve looked. There’s nothing left of the line of Cadmus Perevell, so I’m thinking you might have to go to when there was. Or _is_.”

Harry eyes her tiredly. He is slumped at the kitchen table in Grimmauld Place, exhaustedly looking into his tea. It’s tepid, but there’s nothing dead in it. He can hear the ghost under the stairs whispering to him, but it’s become a soft and familiar murmur. He can more or less tune it out now. He isn’t interested in moving anywhere, because he hit a good balance of dead things versus actual reality while sitting at this table about four hours ago. It is seven in the morning. 

Something about what Hermione‘s saying isn‘t processing. He squints at her, belatedly realising he’s not wearing glasses. “What.”

“She’s lost it,” Ron says, closing the door after himself and tossing his cloak over the back of a chair. He doesn’t sound very distressed about Hermione’s relative sanity. 

“Don’t be absurd, Ron. I haven’t _lost it._ Wizards have been fooling around with time for decades. I’m certain we can find some way to do it if we apply ourselves properly.”

“Right, because the entire Department of Mysteries--”

“Is hobbled by administrative red tape and bureaucratic minutia. Besides, if we accepted that just because the Ministry couldn’t do something it was impossible, we’d never have gotten anywhere.”

“Odd attitude for a Ministry employee.”

“I have an insider perspective. Now.” She fixes him in her sights and Ron freezes like a baby bird before a cobra. “I have a list. I need several of these from the Hogwarts library, so you’ll have to persuade McGonagall to give them up.”

“ _Me_?” Ron says incredulously.

“Did you want to send Harry?”

Both of them glance at him, and he must look truly awful, because Ron just makes a disgusted sound in his throat. After a second, he plucks the list from Hermione’s hand. “This is going to end badly,” he warns. 

“Don’t be silly. See you in a bit.” Satisfied, she returns her attention to her book. 

Then they get down to business. 

* * *

That’s how they end up here, with memories of corned beef sandwiches and Hermione’s last minute warnings about alternative time lines. 

Harry wishes -- hard, painfully, _badly_ \- that he can take both or either of them with him. But they have lives here, they’ve built careers and they have friends and they have each other. There is no point in subjecting either of them to the kind of strain this spell will cause. 

The only reason Harry is taking such a dramatic risk with himself is that... well. He’s probably going to die without it -- or he’ll go mad, and then die. 

It says something about Ron and Hermione that they’re both perfectly willing to bend time and space with experimental and forbidden magic instead of letting that happen to him. 

Harry swallows. He takes one last look at them and he fixes it in his memory. This is the last time. He pays attention to the fall of Hermione’s hair, the set of Ron’s shoulders. The way they stand, the gestures they make. The specific way Hermione’s voice rises when she asks a question she already knows the bloody answer to. 

“I’ll miss you,” he blurts.

“Yeah,” Ron agrees placidly. “I bet you will.”

Hermione smacks him. 

“Ow!”

“We’ll miss you, too, Harry, _obviously_ ,” she says with emphasis, and then after a moment of fidgeting she darts forward and flings her arms around his neck. “Oh, god. Be _careful_ , Harry. Please.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I will be. Of course," he says, hoping he sounded convincing. 

Ron meets his eyes over her shoulder and raises his eyebrows at him. Harry feels the smile twitch across his lips. It feels like the first time he’s smiled in a long time. He rolls his eyes right back. 

Hermione squeezes tighter. 

Then they part. “Right. Let’s do it.”

So they do. 


	5. Chapter 5

Harry squeezes his eyes shut against the light and the colour and the overwhelming sense of wrongness, and when he cracks them open again it is to a sloped, stained ceiling he hasn’t seen in a long time. 

It’s his cupboard. The one under the stairs at #4 Privet Drive. 

He blinks slowly. 

Harry dashes the tears from his face -- the spell was overwhelming in all the worst ways -- and stumbles up from the cramped cot. His legs are too short and pretty spindly and when he takes a step the floor isn’t quite where he expects it. He sags against the wall for a few long and awkward moments. Okay. Feet. Sure. 

The carpet underfoot is plush, muggle-made, strange but familiar. He curls his bare toes and swallows. 

When Harry finally makes it out, he discovers the house is just as he remembers it -- clean, boring and lovingly decorated with pictures of Dudley, who Harry still feels does not add much to the decor. There’s a grey light rising outside the flowered curtains and the clock says it’s just going six, so... probably nobody will be up yet. 

Harry glances out through the crack in the curtains and on to the street. There he sees the shade of a boy in shorts and suspenders sprawled across the bitumen. At some point the poor thing must have been struck by a car, although his clothing says he’s not a recent ghost.

Harry tips his head until he can’t see him anymore.

Whatever else has happened, the ability to see the echoes of the dead has followed him here. 

He can still hear the whispers, too. They drift in and out, sometimes loud and sometimes barely audible. He closes his eyes. ‘He always _says_ he won’t do it again,’ and ‘What kind of dummy walks straight into traffic?’ 

He considers the telly for a moment but then decides he doesn’t dare risk waking the Dursleys to discover the date -- even if he mutes it quickly, the first blast of sound will probably wake someone. Petunia is a light sleeper.

It’s not long before he can guess, anyway -- Petunia is up within the hour, fussing in the kitchen, carefully arranging Dudley’s birthday presents on the table. They’re brightly wrapped, and the whole table is swallowed in riotous, coloured paper. There’s very little room for breakfast. Despite how they overflowed from the table, when Dudley gets up he raises hell about them, crying and bellowing that there aren’t enough.

It’s all very familiar. 

“Hermione,” mutters Harry, still shocked and a little detached, while he washes the dishes following a huge and unnecessarily messy breakfast (titled ‘birthday breaky for my beautiful boy,’ by his aunt, who is better at alliteration than parenting), “you are brilliant. _Mental_ , but brilliant.”

* * *

The Dursleys are... horrid people. 

Harry knows this intellectually, of course, but now he’s here with them. And with the advantage of age and experience they actually seem... well. 

Harry doesn’t pay much attention to his memories of the Dursleys most of the time. He has better things to think about. Time seems to have softened them, to be honest. He really doesn’t remember being manhandled this often or grabbed this roughly, and he certainly doesn’t remember Petunia and Vernon talking over his head about how best they can fob him off on somebody else for Dudley’s birthday -- in his memory, they mostly just wanted to keep him close, keep an eye on him, make sure he was as miserable as possible... 

Then, too, his memories couldn’t have done justice to the wails and hysterics of Dudley’s colossal tantrum when he learns Harry is coming along on his trip to the zoo. Oh, Harry remembers beforehand that there’s some kind of fuss, but there’s nothing like experiencing it all over again -- every red-faced, ear-shattering cry of it. 

The tears are a nice touch, he thinks, with the distance of adulthood and perhaps a bit of envy. Harry never had learnt to cry on command -- and half the time when he really wants to cry he can’t anyway. He's had too much practice holding it in and now he doesn't know how to stop.

Vernon takes a bruising grip on his skinny biceps and yanks him aside before they leave. After explaining in a low rumbling growl how important it is not to somehow destroy Vernon’s new car -- which Harry feels is probably more endangered by his uncle's driving than by Harry, but all right -- he leans close enough that Harry can feel the bristles of his large moustache right against his cheek. 

“Any funny business,” he snarls darkly, “and you’ll be in that cupboard from now until Christmas!” And he gives Harry a firm shake with his grip on his arm, just to drive the point home. 

Harry is suddenly and abruptly reminded that Dudley’s birthday at the zoo had proven to be an unmitigated disaster last time -- and it probably will again somehow, in some way Harry can’t really predict, because Dudley excels at making his parents angry with Harry. 

Harry does not want to be locked in the cupboard. Aside from the obvious business where it’s a vile and stupid thing to do to a child, Harry’s got actual things to be doing. He needs to check Azkaban. He needs to get to Morfin Gaunt in there - preferably legally, because otherwise Harry will have to break into Azkaban and... that’s not ideal. 

Morfin is alive until 1994, according to the obituaries. He has plenty of time before Morfin dies -- but less time, he suspects, before _Harry_ goes completely off the rails. 

He thinks this over as he squeezes into the car next to Piers Polkiss. The boy is extremely skinny, which is lucky, because Dudley is extremely fat; the three of them in the back seat take up roughly the correct amount of space for three small humans. 

There’s actually a lot he’s forgotten, and it is confusing to remember it now. The new-leather smell of Vernon’s car goes right to his head and turns his stomach. He hasn’t smelt anything like this in decades, but it’s so familiar now.

There’s another problem, of course, and one which he only thinks of once the car’s pulling out of the drive. The wards on #4 Privet Drive are held up because Harry calls it home -- a horrid and unpleasant home, but still the place he must return to, where he eats and sleeps and lives with his family. But Harry hasn’t considered that place his home in years now, so, really, he doubts the wards will exist for long.

He can see a grey-furred kneazle half-breed perched on Mrs Figg’s fence as they drive past. It watches them with its clever yellow eyes, smart as every part-kneazle seems to be. Harry knows that Mrs Figg keeps an eye on him for Dumbledore. It is her job to make sure that, even if he’s miserable, he isn’t actually in danger from any magical source. 

It occurs to him now, as an adult, that a lot of effort actually went into protecting him during his childhood. But only from magic -- because wizards and witches think magic is the most important and dangerous thing in the world. Harry’s probably lucky that the likes of Lucius Malfoy will off himself before he ever picks up a phone book.

When the wards fall, he’s pretty sure _someone_ will notice. Either Mrs Figg, or Dumbledore, or -- Merlin, even McGonagall hangs around the Dursleys’ house occasionally in her cat shape, doesn’t she?

He can’t fix wards, he hasn’t the expertise.

He thinks on it, but he’s almost certain he can’t avoid the problem of the wards. 

There is a woman in the front yard of the next house, one with a bloody mess where her right eye should be, stumbling around in only her stays. She walks straight through the fence and into the road, and Vernon drives through her without even noticing.

She doesn’t flinch, but Harry does, unable to stop himself from expecting the collision. The woman’s remaining eye widens and focuses suddenly -- and her fingers drag through his hair and pull at his head. They don’t go through him as completely as a ghost’s should. His head jerks with her tugging, seeking fingers. He suppresses a wince. 

“Stay still,” snaps Petunia, eyeing him suspiciously. 

He nods and rubs his scalp. 

Maybe, he decides, he’ll just leave. It will raise suspicion if he leaves, of course. But is he really trying to avoid suspicion? As long as he gets a few phials of Morfin’s blood, it doesn’t really matter to him -- anything else he’ll be able to deal with. 

He considers what might happen if he just... tells people exactly what’s happened and why he’s here. It’d be a media circus, for one -- _boy who lived travels through time_ is a terrifying headline. It sounds like something the Quibbler would lead with, and that’s really saying something. Then there’s the problem where he’d be the first survivor of such advanced time travel in living memory -- the chances of him escaping the Department of Mysteries are slim even if he flees the country. 

What Harry wants, he thinks, closing his eyes against the ghosts in the scenery as it races past his window, is to get Morfin’s blood, sort out his potion, and then pack himself off to Hogwarts and exist in peace for a while. 

Not that any school year at Hogwarts is peaceful, exactly, but there’s no denying that his school years were by far the best time in his life. 

He thinks on it. 

Yes, he decides, he’ll leave the Dursleys as soon as it’s practicable. Even Dumbledore will find it hard to leap to ‘future Harry travelling back in time’ from the given evidence... and Harry will still show up at school, of course.

He scratches his head.

Well, he’d better leave before they decide to lock him back in the cupboard. 

Going to the zoo is actually kind of a blessing. Petunia is much too concerned with Dudley and Piers to notice when Harry dips into her handbag for his bus fare. She, like every person he’s ever met who carries a handbag, has a collection of loose change rattling around in the bottom that is not to be underestimated. 

And then, once they actually get through the turnstile at the zoo, Harry promptly loses them all in the heat, colour and bright foliage of the butterfly exhibit. He doubles back, leaves the premises, and is on board the first bus to Charing Cross before they can even begin to miss him. 

He breathes a sigh of relief as the bus pulls out. 

The dead are relentless, especially this close to a huge centre of population, and especially on the major roads. In muggle London, Harry sees more blood and protruding bones and flattened torsos than he ever wants to. 

People stumble on the street and mumble incoherently from where they lay on the ground. At a red light, Harry can see the bumper, indicators and one front fender of a nearby car with ghostly remains smeared over them. He is relieved when it overtakes the bus and speeds away.

He’s never considered the death toll of London’s roads before, but now he wonders about those Christmastime advertisements warning against drunken driving. He remembers them dimly from his childhood, seen over Dudley’s gargantuan shoulder while Harry cleaned up after dinner...

Maybe there’s something to those ads after all. 

He closes his eyes for a few stops, trying to ignore his surroundings so he can plan. Unfortunately, he has to open them again to pay attention to where the bus is going. 

Harry disembarks, finally, ignoring everybody around him. He’s reasonably certain the driver has to be a live person, but the rest -- he doesn’t want to accidentally acknowledge any of the dead. Increasingly his attention seems to give them more power.

The closer Harry gets to wizarding areas of the city, the more likely it is somebody will recognise him, he knows. Nervously he flattens his hair over his forehead to hide his scar. He walks with his head down. The scar should be the only thing that identifies him. As long as it is covered, he should be safe. 

He heads up the street, scanning the shops and trying to ignore the crushing crowds until his eyes finally light upon the Leaky Cauldron. He ducks into its dim interior. The pub never changes: grubby, comfortable, warm. The rich bittersweet smell of butterbeer doesn’t quite drown out the smell of the fire, which burns here even in summer. The Floo is in frequent use. 

Even as Harry passes through, he has to dodge a wizard with a lopsided purple tophat who stumbles out in a flash of green light, smoking faintly around the edges. 

‘Maurice,’ sighs somebody at the edge of his hearing, ‘you’re going to hurt yourself doing it like that.’

Harry blinks, but the wizard’s mouth isn’t moving. He can’t see who -- 

Ah. Of course. 

Harry takes a deep breath. 

...Gringotts, right. 


	6. Chapter 6

Diagon Alley isn’t littered with the dead the way the rest of London is -- presumably, he guesses, because muggles can't get here without help. Magical Britain is a much smaller population then muggle Britain, and they tend to die in weird and spectacular ways -- eaten by dragons, magical experiments, potions explosions.

So the dead in Diagon Alley are fewer, but the ones he sees there are often even harder to tell apart from the living, because living witches and wizards can be... weird and gross in their own right. Some are still easy, if uncomfortable, to tell apart -- including one memorable person whose face seems to have been partially scraped off. He can see sinew and bone, and as his eyes flick unavoidably over her she digs her nails in and scratches frantically, peeling away what's left of her skin, which rolls up dark and scungy under her nails.

But mostly it's harder. Fashions are unpredictable and more based on individual preference than season or trend, so Harry can’t easily eliminate women in big poofy dresses or young boys in suspenders as already being dead. Then, there are plenty of ways to die in the wizarding world that don’t leave mark, which complicates things -- for example,during the first war with Voldemort there were a lot of deaths from the Killing Curse.

Harry finds himself sidestepping people who don’t exist as though they're real, and his attention makes their distant and glazed eyes narrow in on him and their icy fingers reach out. He walks into a real person once, but once is enough. 

“Watch where you’re going!”

“Sorry, I didn’t -- sorry.”

“I should say so. Children these days--”

Gringotts is probably the worst place in the alley. More than one wizard died trying to force its doors during the last goblin rebellion, of course, and now the ghosts of wizards with ghastly, fatal war wounds linger there. As Harry approaches, one of them swipes his hands right through the head of the goblin on door duty.

The white stone steps seem to take forever to climb, and the hissing and jeers of the dead follow Harry with every step. 

“You can see me, boy, don’t think I can’t tell,” croons one crone, becoming animated as Harry chances to look at her by accident. Her head is partially crushed and there’s odd, watery blood dripping from her ear. He clenches his jaw and ignores her. This is why he's back in the past -- soon he'll fix this and it'll never be a problem again. 

The goblin at the door doesn’t even blink at the idea of a child going to the bank alone. Goblins, in Harry’s experience, are reliably indifferent to things that don’t make or lose them money. Honestly, he's said some rude things about that cultural trait before. But he finds himself thinking of it sort of fondly right now. It's nice that something is that reliable right now.

Harry sidesteps a man with a goblin's pickaxe lodged in his skull to get to his teller. It’s currently before the school letters go out and in the middle of the morning, so the bank is probably - presumably, at least - reasonably empty of living people, but it looks full to him. Harry thinks he can pick one or two real people out from the milling dead -- people who seem smoother, more cogent, less jerky. 

He tugs on his fringe and ignores them all, and pretends he can’t hear somebody complaining that Kelly hasn’t paid her rent this month. 

Despite what feels like an uncomfortable wait, Harry is seen very quickly.

“I need a new key,” he admits directly. The goblins are going to take a dim view of the request, but he has a lot of experience with appeasing annoyed goblins now -- ever since he escaped Gringott’s on the back of one of their own dragons after robbing one of their vaults, actually. It’s always best to be direct and to the point with the whole lot of them. 

The goblin gives him the world’s flattest and least impressed look down his long, pointed nose. He has clever skinny fingers like all goblins, and his greyish beard is long and neatly braided. He makes a gutteral noise of disapproval in his throat. “Your name,” he says flatly.

“Er.” Harry leans in a little. “Harry Potter,” he says quietly. None of the people around him so much as twitch in response, of course, but most of them were probably dead by the time he became famous... and he's not sure how much they really understand, either.

The goblin doesn’t even blink. “Date of birth?”

The questions go on and on -- some are personal information that makes some sense, but what they want with his blood type and muggle post code (or how they even know it for comparison) eludes Harry completely. 

Eventually the goblin gives him a long, unhappy look and rolls a piece of blackened parchment and a pin toward him. “Blood,” he orders. 

Harry obligingly pricks his finger and presses it to the paper. The whole sheet turns immediately red.

To Harry‘s relief, the goblin says: “That seems in order, then.”

‘Did Elladora ever make you that pie?’ somebody asks loudly.  

“What?” Harry says, before he realises that the voice is feminine and definitely does not belong to the goblin before him. 

“I said, ‘That seems in order’,” repeats the goblin impatiently, raising his voice. 

Harry blinks. He’d heard that, but -- oh. “Oh. Thanks,” he says.

With a lingering glare for Harry, the goblin shuffles through several things Harry can’t see from his vantage, and then he produces a brand new brass key. “Do not lose it, Mr Potter,” he warns. 

“Thanks. I’ll try not to.”

“Hmph. Will you be making a withdrawal today?”

“Yes, please.”

If he begs an expanded bag off them -- for a steep price, no doubt -- he can take out a large sum and then handily avoid coming back here for a long time to come. 

Going by the expression on the goblin’s face, Harry isn’t the only one hoping for that outcome.

The less he thinks about that cart ride, the better. A lot of people have died in the dim goblin tunnels beneath the bank.

He emerges, blinking, into the sun. He feels like he’s been marinated in death, in dead things and bad, bad magic. He rubs his eyes. Dead people drift before him. Alright. He breathes in and out carefully. He's -- what's next?

Getting into Azkaban itself might be tricky, but he at least knows where to go to ask about the process. 

Actually getting to the Ministry offices is an exercise in fortitude and patience, because whispers follow him and violent deaths dance before his eyes. The least violent ones pose a problem all on their own, because they’re the hardest to pick -- they seem to leave the best camouflaged ghosts. Their physical forms are harder to differentiate from the living. Three times on his journey between Diagon Alley and the Ministry’s offices, Harry steps out of the way of a dead man and into the way of a live -- and annoyed -- person. One of the dead follows him for blocks. 

Conversations keep echoing around him. Sometimes they’re clear and loud and distracting, but the softer ones -- those indistinct whispers that seem to filter through his skull with a soft chill -- are equally confusing.

By the time he makes it to the Ministry’s phone booth entryway, Harry is numbly tired, detached and confused. He doesn‘t blink to see a muggle man with a cut throat leaning his head against the glass, muttering to himself wetly. He edges around cautiously and steps inside. 

“Six... two, four, four... two,” mutters Harry, dialling carefully and trying to focus entirely on the business of entering the Ministry offices and not on the horror show outside the box. 

For his reason for attendance, he thinks for a second and then tells the phone he is requesting access to some records, he doesn’t have a wand to register, and that his name is James Evans. It accepts all of this information without hesitation.

The atrium is different in the past. There are the usual long polished floors and gilded Floo exits and entries, but the fountain is still the old one -- a wizard, a witch, a house-elf, a centaur and a goblin, all golden and gleaming under the lights. Harry thinks he liked it better than the Magic is Might one that lived there for a brief period, but... 

In his time, they’ve replaced it with a memorial. Harry threw a lot of celebrity weight around making sure Dobby’s name was on it.

Dobby’s still alive in this timeline, though. He guesses that’s a fair exchange, although the thought of Dobby living with the Malfoys is a little hard to stomach.

He heads for the elevators, ignoring three colourful paper planes zooming overhead. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is on level two. 

“Is your mother here somewhere?” asks an elderly wizard, eyeing Harry dubiously. There’s a moment where Harry panics, unsure if he’s actually alive or not. 

Calm down, he tells himself, grinding his teeth. Think. He’s not washed out like a ghost. He’s wearing bright robes of green and magenta, and his hat is orange with green stars patched on. It’s riotous fashion ala Dumbledore, but none of it seems unreal. It’s not translucent. The man’s skin’s flushed, warm and pinkish. Critically, he's paying attention to Harry with clear and lucid eyes. He’s -- probably alive. 

“Yes. I’m meeting her,” says Harry, brushing his fingers over his fringe to make sure it still covers the scar. It seems like it’s holding up well enough. For now.

“Ah,” says the man. “Best not to keep her waiting, then.”

“No,” Harry agrees. "I shouldn't." 

Hermione’s research indicates that Morfin Gaunt lives until 1994, when his obituary is published in a tiny corner of a January Prophet. So Harry does not expect him to be in particularly good form --  having been imprisoned with dementors since the 1940s cannot have done him any good, and Dumbledore’s pensieve didn’t exactly paint him as a pillar of mental health to begin with. 

But the good thing about Azkaban -- possibly the only good thing, really -- is that, special cases aside, if somebody is sent there they’re not hard to track down. 

The elderly wizard lets him off the lift at level two without paying him any further attention at all -- the idea that he is nominally under the supervision of another adult has obviously settled in and taken root, thereby absolving the wizard of any feelings of responsibility toward Harry. Perfect.

Harry ducks out of the way of a zooming paper plane memo and turns left at the exit of the elevator. The DMLE offices haven’t changed in decades, possibly centuries, and so Harry knows exactly where he’s headed. 

He makes a beeline (past the washed-out echo of a man in a doublet, who staggers green-faced and leaking across the corridor) to the little-known and even less loved Prison Administration Office, which here is represented by a single desk in a cramped alcove. Behind it is a redheaded, freckled witch perched on a stool. He can smell her perfume, and decides she’s probably alive. She is idly flipping through a very old back issue of Witch Weekly.

From the front cover of the magazine, the ageless Gilderoy Lockhart gives the reader his charming, slightly roguish smile. When Harry was twelve he didn’t understand the appeal at all. As an adult, Harry can appreciate that, quite aside from being obnoxious, incompetent and morally bankrupt, Lockhart is... well. Well. He can see why the man’s face keeps winning awards, that’s all.

“Pretty, isn’t he?” says the witch, smiling at Harry. Her teeth are white. 

“Erm,” says Harry, startled, and jerks his eyes away from Lockhart’s face. Then he remembers that he’s supposed to be ten and he can say pretty much whatever he wants. “Yeah,” he agrees baldly. 

“Mm. I reckon. But don't let your dad hear you say it, though, hey?" Her brow furrows fit a second. "What are you here for? Lost?”

“Er,” says Harry again, feeing very wrong-footed indeed. He can’t help but think she looks awfully like she might be one of Ron’s cousins or aunts or something -- she seems relaxed, warm, friendly, open. That she’s redheaded and freckled helps. There’s also something about her face, around the eyes somewhere -- although if they are related, he’s never met her before. 

“Oh,” he says finally, and thinks he must seem a bit dim. “No, er, I wanted to know if there’s a way to visit an inmate at Azkaban?”

“What,” she says slowly, “like in person?” she puts her magazine down, ignoring the affronted look Lockhart gets as the desk meets his unfairly photogenic nose. 

“Yes?”

A complicated expression crosses her face. “Sorry, love, you need to be at least seventeen to apply. Or if your mum or dad’s around, you could get their permission. Who do you want to visit? Your dad?”

It’s probably an educated guess on her behalf -- Harry’s exactly the right age to have a parent in Azkaban following Voldemort’s defeat, and most marked death eaters on record are men. But it still takes Harry off guard. He hesitates. 

“No,” he says, “it’s someone who might be related. I wanted to ask him,” he lies then. He is probably related to Morfin, obviously, but presumably no more recently than, say... the Italian Renaissance. 

The witch hums, “Ah, bloodline’s important, of course, of course.”

Harry frowns. In his own time, it’s considered -- well, not really the done thing, exactly, to comment on the importance of blood. Nobody really talks about it anymore, except very old people who remain quite out of touch. Certainly nobody actually discusses pureblood supremacy in public. 

Even Draco Malfoy doesn’t make any sort of public comment on blood purity anymore... although Harry’s pretty sure he’s still scum behind closed doors. But here, now, it’s still something people mention, just... casually. Bloodline is important.

Is it? In a way, it's basically why he's here.

In 1991, Harry guesses it is. In 1991, even the people who don’t care -- not really -- are still aware of blood status as a presence haunting every conversation. 

“Yeah,” he agrees. It’s not the worst lie he’s ever told, and it certainly doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to the witch he’s talking to. 

She licks her teeth, then produces a thick sheaf of parchment from under her desk somewhere. She touches it and hands it to Harry and it’s quite real and solid between his fingers. It dispels his last lingering concerns that she might not be quite alive. 

“You take this back to your mum, right, and you get it signed and fixed up and bring it back here -- then we can see bout adding you to the visitors list at Azkaban, understand?”

Harry examines the parchment. It’s long, full of questions about the person’s relationship with the inmate and all sorts of other required information. The person requesting a visit also has to sign a slip absolving the Ministry of all responsibility should the prison guards make them sick in a ‘temporary or regrettably longterm capacity’.

This form is really not messing about. 

Harry looks at it carefully and nods. “I’ve got it.”

She laughs. “What a sweet, serious little thing you are.”

Harry blinks. Abruptly he remembers he’s ten again. “Er,” he says. 

“You’re lucky I’m not the cheek-pinching type,” she tells him, “but, hey, have we met? I’m terrible with faces but I feel like I should know you.”

Harry quickly shoves the parchment into his picket, heedless of wrinkling it. 

“No,” he says quickly. He fights the urge to flatten his hair over the scar again. It’s fine, it’s covered. Giving into the urge and trying to hide it so obviously right now will only draw attention -- which is the very last thing he wants right now. 

“Hmm,” she sounds unconvinced. “What’s your name, then?”

“Er-- James. Evans.” He remembers that much at least. Harry doesn’t like the _thump thump_ of his heart, which is loud and fast and has caught somewhere in his throat.

“Nope,” says the witch cheerfully. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Well, I’m Polly Prewett,” she adds, and Harry startles a little at that. Maybe she actually is a cousin of Ron’s. “Nice to meet you. You come back if you get that signed, won’t you?”

“Er, right. Yes. I will. By my mother.” Harry closes his mouth before something even stupider sounding comes out somehow. “Thanks. Bye.”

He ducks his head and turns around. It’s best if he gets out quickly -- he has more or less what he needs, and he can figure out how to come back and get into Azkaban later. 

He gives into the urge to smooth his hair down as soon as his back is turned to Polly Prewett’s desk. It’s flat. It’s fine. Nobody will have seen the scar. 

“Hey,” Polly calls to him before he’s gone ten steps. “Jimmy. James!” 

He freezes. Slowly, he turns. “Yes?”

She gives him a long, considering look. “You make sure you ask your mum how she feels about dementors, alright?”

Harry nearly sags with relief. Right. Dementors. That’s... Harry, personally and specifically, has never handled dementors well. And now he doesn’t even have a wand. He’s never met the wizard who could produce a patronus without one, either. Perhaps Dumbledore may have been able -- may yet be able, given that he must be alive in this time line -- but Harry is no Dumbledore. He never will be. 

He licks his lips. “Yeah,” he says back. “I will.”

When he goes, he’ll bring a whole deck of chocolate with him -- although it won’t help much until after exposure. 

He turns and leaves as quickly as his feet will take him. His secondhand sneakers squeak on the magically polished tile of the DMLE’s floors. 


	7. Chapter 7

Harry exits the Ministry via the same awful phone booth experience he had getting in, and the man with the cut throat is still there, bleeding right outside the booth. Except now he’s staring right at Harry. His face is pressed so close Harry can see the whites of his eyes. He looks just as real and solid to Harry as the stressed father trying to corral his two children only a few metres away.

The dead man’s mouth moves, but of course nothing comes out. His throat’s been cut. He can’t talk. His fingers scrape the glass of the phone booth.

For a long moment he can’t look away. But the more Harry watches him, the more the man’s ghastly face seems full of personality -- and panic -- and the more focus he brings to weigh upon Harry.

Great. That’s... just great.

Harry can’t think with that thing staring at him. He’s in London. Okay. Where in London? Where can he go?

He looks away, firmly ignores the spectre, and starts walking. There’s a crunch as the man lurches away from the phone booth and tries to follow, and that --

He hopes that’s some grizzly snapping bone. Or maybe it’s something in the dead man’s clothes making that sound. The alternative is that that crunch is the sound of something _real and physical_ crunching beneath a foot.

He glances helplessly back, but he can’t see what it might be either way. The man is holding his neck, staring at Harry as he stumbles forward, mouth moving soundlessly.

Harry walks faster. He feels curiously like he can't breathe.

Morfin. He’ll. He’ll see Morfin, he’ll get his blood, he’ll make the potion. It’ll be fine. His hands are sweating.

Behind him something clatters. It’s close. He doesn’t know what it might be, but he flinches and breaks into a run anyway. He can't help it.

Nobody pays much attention to a running ten year old. Children are always underfoot.

It’s a few blocks before he slows, and then when he chances glancing over his shoulder again Harry sees plenty of people, dead largely distinguishable from the living only by their older clothes and the evident trauma of London’s road toll. But the man with the cut neck isn’t there.

He breathes out, slowly, and feels abruptly very stupid.

What’s he doing racing down the street to get away from something that can barely even touch him?

He’s not _scared_ of ghosts. He knows ghosts. Some of them are even all right -- the Friar, for example, or Nearly Headless Nick.

He’s not scared of the dead. They’re _dead_. May as well be scared of paintings.

These dead aren’t like that, though, he thinks immediately after that thought crosses his mind. They’re like... like ghostly inferi, but not under anybody’s control, and... Harry does not want them to grab him.

He has no idea what might happen if one of them should get a proper hold on him. He isn’t curious.

Harry rubs his hands through his hair and flinches away from a woman with wild hair and torn clothes with the buttons all ripped off and an ugly, bleeding head wound. That one’s not a traffic accident.

He ducks his head and forges onward, despite her slurred, “Help me, call triple nine, help--” that disappears into the background noise as he goes.

It’s a lot easier to ignore the dead when he looks nowhere but his own feet and ignores anyone who pays him any attention. He can still feel the icy touch of their fingers on his skin, but if he keeps walking and doesn’t acknowledge them they slip away.

He doesn’t look at them. At this point he feels like he must not.

“Sorry,” he mumbles whenever somebody’s feet come too close in his peripheral vision. “Excuse me. Sorry.” He’s not sure if they’re real or not, these people he’s apologising to.

He really, honestly hates this city.

Harry fetches up in a tiny, cramped toilet cubicle in the museum. It smells terrible but there are no ghosts. Nobody stares at him. The voices are -- faint here. Fainter than he’s come to expect, especially in London.

It’s mostly just Harry and the vile smell and the peeling paint of the walls.

He has -- he needs to find somewhere to stay. Somewhere to sleep. Hotel, maybe. He considers the Leaky Cauldron, but he immediately thinks better of it.

It would really be a better idea to avoid staying too long in wizarding areas altogether. Aside from the potential for him to be recognised as a bit of a celebrity, he’s aware that surely somebody -- Mrs Figg, if nobody else -- is going to notice he’s not back at #4 sooner or later. It’s awkward, because Harry doesn’t want to go back there -- he has much better things to do with his time than to get himself locked in a cupboard for weeks, like... basically anything.

Harry could spend the next weeks sitting right here, on the lid of a public toilet, and it’d still be a better use of time than going back to the Dursleys.

So he can’t go back to the Dursleys, and since he can’t, that means not being found and _sent_ back, either.

He rubs his scar thoughtfully. There’s plenty of muggle places, anyway, he can just...

Of course, staying in the muggle world is a fine idea in theory, but in practice it means going back to the bloody goblins.

“Mister Potter,” says the exact same goblin with the plaited beard and the annoyed face, some ninety minutes later. He leans across his tall desk and sneers intently down at him. Its eyes are dark and glittering.

There is a long pause. “Still have your key, I hope.”

Harry winces.“Yeah. Sorry. Erm, I’ve got it, hang on.”

“I am very glad to hear it,” the goblin drawls.

It takes Harry several minutes, though, to dig his key back out. He knows he has it, but not precisely where he put it. The goblin says nothing, but sighs heavily and makes it nonetheless evident that he takes a dim view of the delay.

Getting his money changed is a deeply awkward experience. Harry apologises three times and talks as though ‘erm’ is the primary constituent of his entire vocabulary.

It’s worth it, though, because he leaves wizarding London with more than enough muggle money to get by - and he rapidly discovers that he’s forgotten to account for inflation anyway.

Harry’s major requirements for a place to stay are that there are no dead people hanging about and nobody asks too many questions. The latter is easier to find than the former -- and, if he thinks about it, it makes a macabre kind of sense that a lot of people who are now dead once also sought places to stay where no questions were asked. Cheery thought.

In the end, he takes a bus quite some distance out of the city past the surrounding suburbs and into the countryside -- or, well, what looks to Harry like the muggle parts of the countryside. There’s still a bus route out there from the city, after all, so it’s perhaps not properly rural.

In the end Harry finds himself at a run down budget hotel next to an off-license and a service station. It sits by the side of a highway that seems to snake out forever into increasingly isolated fields of cow-dotted grass and big metal sheds, and there’s a sign at the bus stop that suggests he’s just fifteen minutes away from a miniscule village that boasts both a Sainsbury’s and a cinema.

The hotel’s dated but not old enough to be dignified: all blond brick and bottle glass and all sorts of things painted a pale avocado green. The ceilings are close and oppressive. Harry lies about his mother being in the car when he books a room. The receptionist is a bored woman behind a formica bench, bracketed by filing cabinets and more interested in her long and talonlike nails than his circumstances -- or the legality of renting to him.

“Doesn’t want to come in?” she says, raising one heavily plucked eyebrow at the cash he passes over. “Huh. Right. Room 21, ground level,” she adds indifferently, passing over a stained key on a plastic tag. “Check out’s at twelve.”

“Right. Thanks.” He scribbles ‘J  EVANS’ where she indicates with one yellow-painted nail.

So she probably thinks he’s the child of some kind of criminal, but she doesn’t seem very interested -- and she also doesn’t seem to think he might be a runaway. No need to call the department of child welfare, and that’s really what Harry’s worried about, so he ignores all other implications.

The room’s clean enough for Harry (which isn’t necessarily a high standard) and there is nothing obviously dead waiting for him. It smells like it needs airing. The tiles are cracked in the bathroom. One tiny corner of the room dedicated to a sink, a kettle and a few teabags wrapped in yellowing paper packaging. There is a bed with a foam mattress, a scratched table and an old chair, and a bulky telly with a tiny screen jammed into one corner. The ceiling has a dark stain in one corner, but nothing smells.

Harry closes his eyes and tilts his head, listening hard.

At the very edge of his hearing there’s a soft noise. It’s a woman’s voice, but it’s distant and indecipherable. He only hears it at all because he’s paying attention. It’s no worse than hearing a neighbour talking, muffled through a wall, and he has no idea if the person he hears is dead anyway. It could quite reasonably just be another person in the motel.

It’ll do. He kicks his sneakers off, sits on the edge of the musty bed, and digs out the parchment he got from the Prisoner Administration Office again.

Harry doesn’t switch the lights on. He doesn’t bother. And now that he’s sitting down comfortably upon the bed in the dark and the quiet here, the light switch seems... miles away.

He misses his wand fiercely. It’s a constant battle not to reach for it at every turn, but it’s not the big dramatic spells he misses -- it’s not stunning spells and patronus charms that he wants. There’s a charm for temperature control, a charm for light, for dark, for navigation, for getting things down from tall shelves. Harry misses the day to day utility of his wand.

There’s nothing he can do about it, though. Not short of stealing somebody else’s wand -- he can’t buy one until he’s at least eleven. And Harry is sanguine about lying to the Ministry of Magic, but he’s not fool enough to try it with Ollivander.

He sleeps without really noticing that he’s drifted off, so exhausted does he feel from the long, long day’s events. When he sleeps he dreams of the dead. They don’t hurt him -- they just reach for him, slow and steady, implacable and proprietary. Their touch gives Harry a chill.

He wakes up icy cold, nauseated and exhausted and with gritty sore eyes. That’s never happened to him before, but given the general trajectory of his life, Harry can’t say it’s all that surprising a development.

It does serve to remind him that there’s no escape from the dead. Not really. Maybe when he gets Morfin’s blood... but even then, Gawaine seemed to think that the potion would help but not cure him.

Harry stares tiredly at the stained ceiling above and wonders what he’s going to do if it really doesn’t work. It should, he thinks. If not...

He falls into a doze again around one and again he dreams of icy fingers and whispering voices. Harry wakes up feeling like he hasn’t slept at all. He can hear the quiet sounds of a woman talking and it takes him a few confused minutes to remember that he’s in a muggle hotel, where nobody has used ‘thou’ in centuries.

She must be long dead. He’s hearing an echo. He takes a deep breath.

He gets up, finally, before the sun, unable to sleep. The rest doesn’t feel like it has helped him at all and as he pockets his room key and steps outside he can see another car crash victim pacing the empty road in the dark. He looks lost and confused. Harry pretends not to notice him and hopes he won’t notice Harry.

The busses don’t start running until after six according to the timetable at the stop, but the service station is already open. Light glows brightly from the big windows, spilling out to illuminate petrol pumps and an old vending machine. Everything is still and silent at this time of day, so even Harry’s quiet footsteps seem loud on the concrete.

The hotel room has tea, but it looks about as old as the building is and Harry doesn’t trust it. He gets a tooth brush and a slightly stale jam doughnut from he service station instead. That will do for the morning - at least enough to be going on with.

Harry washes his face with the faintly rusty water from the bathroom tap back in his room, then eats his breakfast and fills out the Ministry’s paperwork. There’s a pen in his hotel room. It’s chained to the table by a plastic line and Harry wonders if that means somebody got really sick of people absconding with their valuable biros.

He doesn’t like paperwork as a rule, but he discovers it’s a lot easier to complete when he’s making it up as he goes along.

By the time Harry’s done, the sun is rising and there is nearly nothing true on the parchment. He is, he supposes, his own guardian at least -- that much is right.

The busses are running now, so he tucks the parchment away and with his jaw clenched Harry prepares to wade back into the seething morass of dead spirits that haunt London.

The bus ride is long. The whole vehicle trembles and shakes with the efforts of its engine. Harry rests his head on the window glass and closes his eyes. He can’t see the dead on the roads that way, but he can still hear them.

“‘Ca-fe-ti-era’,” somebody complains right in his ear, so loud and close that he cracks his eyes open. “It’s a bloody _coffee pot_ , you enormous, pretentious wanker.” Nobody is there when Harry turns and looks, of course.

Polly Prewett looks suspicious and a little queasy when Harry presents her with the completed forms.

Belatedly, Harry realises that at least some of her good cheer yesterday had been the result of a -- pretty reasonable, really -- belief that no parent or guardian would be daft enough to let a ten year old child visit Azkaban. Now she examines the parchment with deep suspicion.

It passes her inspection. Of course it does: the form, after all, has been filled out by an adult. The handwriting, vocabulary and syntax are all obviously an adult’s.

“Is your dad a muggle then?” Polly asks finally, looking at him with a stiff set to her jaw.

Harry is surprised that she just comes right out and asks it, but, again, it’s a different time.

“Does that matter?” he asks, although of course no wizard would be likely to write with a biro. It must seem like the obvious conclusion to Polly.

“I just don’t think he’d let you go, if he knew more about the prison guards,” she tells him bluntly, but her eyes linger on the final bit of parchment -- the part waiving Ministry responsibility for any repercussions of spending time with the dementors.

“He doesn’t really care what I do,” Harry says awkwardly into her unhappy silence. “So how do I get added to the visitors’ list?”

Her mouth tightens like this is absolutely not the answer she wanted, but the paperwork is completed correctly. It includes a story about James Evans looking for the uncle of his deceased mother, and his suspicion that it may be Morfin Gaunt.

“I’ll process this today,” she says finally, looking like it goes against her better judgement but not against her need to get paid, “and they’ll look at it at the prison in the next day or two. It’s not going to take more than a week at most. You should know, though -- if your great uncle’s been in Azkaban for forty, fifty years, he’ll be a bit, erm. A bit funny.”

“Funny,” Harry repeats. That’s a euphemism for ‘very unstable’ he hasn’t heard in decades.

“Right. The guards at Azkaban, they sort of suck all the good feelings out of a person. So if your great uncle’s been in there for too long, he’ll be a bit -- peculiar. Might not remember things. That sort of thing.” She looks deeply uncomfortable now.

If forty years in Azkaban makes a person ‘a bit peculiar’, Harry wonders what the standard is for ‘stark raving mad’. Sirius had been in there for a comparatively brief thirteen years and even he had been... well. Harry would have said he was more than ‘a bit peculiar’. Not raving, exactly, but... bad.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he says, mostly for the sake of saying something to end the conversation.

He leaves Polly with the name of the hotel at which he’s staying, to direct any owls, and heads back out into the city.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

The city whispers to Harry. It is filled with old dead things that make him tired and confused. The echos of the dead follow him, relentlessly dogging his steps through its narrow streets, and their freezing fingers pluck and pick at him.

He goes food shopping for simple things he can eat in a dank hotel room and buys enough clothing to last a few days - nothing fancy, Harry doesn’t need fancy muggle clothing (he rarely even needs fancy wizarding clothing, honestly). He gets most of that from secondhand stores. It’s cheap and plentiful there because children Harry’s size have a habit of rapidly outgrowing their clothes.

After that, he gets out of the city. There’s a lot he’d rather do - he could pick up a few paperbacks or something for his own entertainment at least -- but the dead are too numerous and he doesn’t feel good staying. The July sun is lulling and warm, but the dead have a distinctly chilling effect on anything they touch. Even aside from their grabbing hands and constant voices, Harry hates the way they make him icy cold and nervous and restless.

He sleeps the day away in his hotel room, cleans himself up and dresses in his cheap secondhand clothes that at least fit. Those cost him maybe five pounds in total, which confirms to Harry that the Dursleys really did give him shit clothes as a child just to make him feel bad. They certainly wouldn’t have missed twenty or thirty pounds a year, and it’s not like Harry would have known the difference between secondhand and new. He barely knows the difference now.

Harry scowls at his bare toes in the flickering bathroom light. He hasn’t thought about the Dursleys in years, but seeing them again has reminded him -- and painfully soured his perspective.

He spends the rest of the evening in a bleak unhappy stupor, watching muggle telly with bleary eyes. It’s compelling because it’s all bright lights and moving pictures, and the wizarding world has no equivalent entertainment. But the content is not very interesting, and Harry feels divorced from and distant to the culture that birthed it. It’s jarring and uncomfortable.

There’s an old Bible in one of the bedside tables, and Harry amuses himself briefly with flipping through it while the television infomercials stream his silhouette upon the walls.

Vernon, technically, is Anglican -- that’s what he writes on the census, anyway. But the Bible really hasn’t played a role in the life of either Harry or Dudley. He’s not sure the Dursleys even own one -- and he can see why. There are no fast cars or explosions at all.

It is equally uninteresting to Harry, who realises he’s going to have to find some way to occupy himself for a week out here without going mad. He’s contemplating another hellish visit to the city out of sheer boredom by the time the sun’s up.

Despite the rough night and the endless infomercials, he doesn’t have time to act upon his increasing restlessness. A barn owl arrives for him that morning, rapping smartly on the glass of his hotel room’s window with its beak.

Harry lets it in and unties the letter from its leg. He has no bacon or sausage meat for it, but he gets it some water in a dish while he reads.  
  


> _Dear Mr Evans,_
> 
> _We at the Azkaban Administrative Centre regret to inform you that the subject of your visitation request (#6697B) has passed away. No next of kin is listed so at your discretion you may view the affects of the deceased at the administrative centre located next to the Visitors’ Floo exit upon Azkaban Island._
> 
> _Such a visit requires no prisoner contact, so you may arrive at any time during office ours over the week following receipt of this letter._
> 
> _Our condolences for your loss,_  
>  _Edgar Leviathan Crabbe II_

  
Harry sits down on the edge of his bed, hard. He ignores the confused coo of the Ministry owl and stares at the letter.

This -- this can’t be right. It _can’t_. Morfin’s obituary isn’t to be published until ‘94 - he can’t be dead in 1991. It doesn’t make any sense.

Harry has _not_ changed enough here to make somebody in Azkaban drop dead three years early.

He packs his things and sends the owl on its way when he goes.

* * *

  


The Azkaban administrative office is a career dead end and a popular gig for aurors who barely make it through basic training. Harry doesn’t remember it improving much in the future, and he thinks that is probably one of the reasons Voldemort’s Azkaban break out in ‘95 was so smooth -- the guards are dementors and the administrative staff are basically auror drop outs who didn’t have the good grace to ...actually drop out.

The office itself is cold -- both because it is sticking out of the side of an island and battered on all fronts by the inclement sea weather, and because of the nearby concentration of dementors. It is made of heavy dark stone and the windows are small and barred with black iron in tight grids. Overall, the effect is grim.

When Harry steps out of the Floo - Diagon Alley to Azkaban after a long early morning bus ride -- in a flash of green light, the first thing he notices is that it is... quiet.

Azkaban is quiet, except for the waves and the fire in its grate.

There are no voices. No wailing. No whispers. No spectres stir, no strange echoes of living beings haunt the room.

It is... still.

It takes a second for even the misery of the place to penetrate through to Harry, quiet as it feels. For the first couple of seconds he relaxes helplessly, bewildered in the silence.

Then it crashes down upon him -- the deep pall of misery that has seeped into the stones. He feels it almost like a physical shroud dropping around him, numb, joyless and curiously muffling. Even the colours seem muted.

He can’t see any dementors, and he doubts they’re in this part of the prison. But with such a concentration of them so nearby, the effects are ...pervasive.

He wonders what working here must do to the staff. It must feel like walking through life faintly oxygen deprived.

Harry takes a deep breath. He’s sure he won’t be here too long. He waits patiently for five minutes in the single chair provided. The Floo is blocked off from the rest of the room by what could otherwise be called a grate -- but it is much too tall and formidable for that. It is more like a series of iron bars that happen to be around a hearth.

“Hello,” he calls when he finally sees a great hulking form shadow the narrow door between this room and the next. For the first time in more than a year, he sees a shape and he is _sure_ it belongs to someone alive. It is an astonishing relief. “It’s James Evans, you wrote to me --”

There is a deep acknowledging grunt and a lumbering tread, and when the figure finally approaches he steps into the dim stream of light from a tiny window. Harry can see immediately that Edgar Crabbe looks very like the rest of his family: big and dim, with heavy hard features and a kind of belligerence that oozes from his pores.

Harry isn’t that surprised to find that he looks just like the rest of them -- pureblood families inbreed, and when a bunch of people won’t stop marrying their own cousins, it shouldn’t surprise anyone if the family starts looking a bit the same.

(Harry, whose father was a pureblood, and who by all accounts is the spitting image of him, elects not to think about what his own family tree might look like. Lily Evans was a muggleborn. It doesn’t count.)

Edgar Crabbe scratches his head and sorts through the letters on his cramped wooden desk while Harry waits for him to figure it out. A clock chimes the hour somewhere deeper in the office and he begins to wonder if Crabbe is going to remember the letter he wrote to Harry at all -- but eventually the big man finds what looks like the very paperwork that Harry provided to Miss Prewett the day prior.

He scans it and Harry can almost see the glimmer of intellect spark briefly behind his small, dull eyes.

“Got your letter?” he asks.

“Er, yes, here --” Harry slips it sideways through the bars.

Crabbe takes it, reads it with agonising slowness -- Harry can see him mouthing the words laboriously as he goes, even though he can only have written the bloody thing himself within the last day or so -- and then grunts in satisfaction. He unlocks the door for Harry.

“Thanks,” says Harry politely, stepping through. It is even colder away from the fire. The pall of the nearby dementors seems even stronger away from the light and warmth of the hearth, and he feels markedly bleaker even in the office.

He gets another grunt in return, which means that Edgar has at least more social skills than Vincent Crabbe did. Maybe he’d have developed some, had he made it to adulthood... but Harry doubts it, and finds him no great loss.

 _This_ Crabbe has a think -- which looks quite hard -- and turns to a grand, heavily-carved wooden chest behind the desk. It’s battered with the abuses of time, but it still looks very sturdy with its big brass locks and multitude of keyholes. Crabbe fishes out an enormous ring of keys, glances at something on his desk, and then spends a very long time trying to chase down the correct key to unlock the compartment containing Gaunt’s things, whatever they might be.

Harry isn’t concerned about that.

“Do you know when Gaunt died? Or of what?”

“No,” says Crabbe, surprisingly fast. There‘s a long pause. “Don’t check on ’em that often.”

“Check on them?” Harry repeats blankly.

“The prisoners,” Crabbe clarifies, after some more deep and ponderous thought. “To see if they’re dead. Governor doesn’t like it if visitors come and the prisoners’re dead. So when there’s a visitor request, we have to check.”

“I’ll bet he doesn’t,” Harry agrees distantly, but his stomach is sinking like a brick in the ocean.

Of course nobody checks unless they have to. Checking on the prisoners would mean braving the dementors. He can’t even really blame Crabbe or any of his colleagues for wanting to avoid that.

He swallows back his sudden dread, which is only made worse by being in this office, here and now, beneath the cold power of the dementors. “So, erm, if nobody wants to visit, how often do you... check?”

There’s another lengthy pause. Crabbe looks up from his keys, concentrating hard as he counts. Harry can practically see the gears turning in his head -- although in Crabbe’s case, they are slow and rusty and squeal in protest when they turn.

“Minister audits every five years,” he says after that very long think, “so about that often.”

Harry closes his eyes, and never mind what Crabbe might think of his expression of despair. He feels powerfully unwell, and he’s pretty sure it has only a little to do with the proximity to the dementors.

 _Of course_. His entry into the timeline isn‘t what caused Morfin Gaunt’s death -- but his request to visit has seen the same death discovered three years earlier.

“Is there --” the sound of his own voice, distant and cool and as though coming from very far away, startles him. Harry stops. Then he licks his lips and starts again, deliberately. “Is there anything of his, er, his body--?”

Crabbe grunts again. “If you’re looking for a family relation, there might be some hair.”

Harry swallows. Hair is... not blood. Hair is -- he’ll have to rework the fluid to solid ratio of the potion a little, and he knows just enough about potions to know that it’s going to be extremely difficult to substitute dead hair for living blood. If it’s even possible. He licks his teeth. “And -- bones?”

He isn’t actually sure, but he has an inkling that bones are better than hair for dark magic, and might be easier to adapt.

“Can’t release them. 'Specially not to a kid. They’ll get interred here.” A pause. “You can come.”

An Azkaban funeral is the last event Harry wants to attend -- but many wizarding funerals are open coffin anyway, so maybe he can...

Is he really thinking about stealing pieces of a wizard at his own funeral?

If he doesn’t, he’ll be stuck with...

Harry bites his lip. What choice does he really have?

Crabbe pauses, still picking through keys like a soft clinking counterpart to Harry’s descent into panic and despair. “Morbid thing, aren’t you?”

Harry shrugs uncomfortably, but Crabbe seems to be considering his request anyway.

“He’s got no other relatives to care,” he says finally, in his slow and ponderous way, leaving his keys dangling in his big hand as though he can‘t concentrate on speaking and sorting through them at the same time, “so I don’t see why you can’t take some hair from the body, so long as you keep it quiet. I’ll show you, come on --”

Harry follows Crabbe’s huge figure through the door, away from the unreliable warmth of the fire and into the icy chill of the prison administration building. They pass under a low stone doorway and down a dim and echoing corridor where the wind whistles through the crumbling mortar. The doors are heavy, steel-banded wood and line each side of the corridor, but Crabbe leads him to one somewhere near the opposite end.

The wizarding world as a rule does not have the modern muggle view of death. Dead things are not frightening and terrible to wizards and witches. Ghosts don’t form the basis of many traditional horror stories. The wizarding world doesn’t try to sanitise ‘passing on’ for children, and neither does it keep them from encountering dead things as a rule -- Harry doesn’t doubt that Aunt Petunia would have thrown a fit if Dudley had been asked to cut the bile duct from a freshly killed armadillo, for example, but it was a pretty common task in Harry’s Potions classes, and not even spoilt brats like Malfoy protested.

Having noted that, Harry is quite sure that a cleverer man than Crabbe -- or perhaps just one exposed to fewer dementors, if Harry’s being generous -- would have some second thoughts about allowing a child of James Evans’s apparent age to view and harvest hair from a dead stranger unsupervised.

He’s really glad hat Crabbe isn’t a clever man, and clearly doesn’t have much imagination as to what Harry might be doing with his ingredients. Strictly speaking, there are very few good uses for human body parts, even in the wizarding world. Maybe especially in the wizarding world.

The body is a mess -- they’ve obviously gotten it a lot closer to its death in this time line than they would have in Harry’s original one, but that doesn’t mean it’s fresh, exactly. It’s puffy with decomposition and it has clearly been charmed against smells because otherwise Harry is sure it would stink to high heaven. The belly is darkly discoloured and swollen, the skin is soft and the flesh beneath is of an alarmingly liquid consistency. And it’s almost worse, really, that Harry can’t smell it, because it’s disturbing and incongruous and, horribly, left up to his imagination.

There’s nothing hovering around the body as Harry very nearly expects. He sort of anticipates some echo, some slice of a spirit lingering...

But then, there have been no dead things here. No voices. No apparitions. He wonders if the dementors have something to do with that, and the sick feeling in his stomach dials up a notch.

Crabbe, bless his dim and task-oriented heart, even gives Harry a paper bag and a pair of clippers before he retreats to lean against the wall and continue fiddling with the many keys on his ring. He seems determined to find the right one, although Harry suspects he has inspected all of them already -- that, or he’s lost his place. Hard to say.

Harry ignores him in favour of the body.

Morfin’s hair is dark and tangled and a little greasy, but there is a lot of it. Harry cuts it in clumps, dumping it into his bag without much care for the mess. A potion shouldn’t need more than a few strands at a time, he’s pretty sure, but he’s also very prepared to get it wrong a lot.

He glances at Crabbe even as he snips. He seems wholly absorbed in his keys.

He wraps the sleeve of his sweater around his own hand, grips Morfin’s wrist with it, and forces the clippers right through his little finger with a grunt. It takes more work than he expects -- but then, bones are strong. The finger tumbles into Harry’s bag. There’s no good way to hide that the corpse is missing one, so Harry angles the hand carefully and hopes Crabbe just won’t notice.

He does it all without ever touching Morfin’s skin -- but then when he’s withdrawing,Harry’s thin and childish fingers connect with the too-soft skin of his arm, entirely by accident.

Immediately, Harry goes cold from head to foot. His vision dissolves in a wash of blackness.

He can’t feel the floor under his feet anymore. There’s just thick, layered shadows and confused voices. The voices are low and whispering and often sort of worried sounding, but Harry can’t make out much more than a word or two.

He can _see_ Morfin, for one brief second -- a man with missing teeth and eyes staring in opposite directions. Despite all this he looks much better in that strange, frozen moment than Harry knows he does in real life. In real life he is rotting slowly on a pallet under Crabbe’s dubious care in a windowless room in Azkaban.

His voice is just as confused as the rest of them, one among the cacophony. It is distinguished only by a low hissing quality that the others lack, but he’s saying more or less the same things: _Where am I? What is this? Who are you?_

He is cut off abruptly, the same way they all are, and his mouth moves soundlessly. Despite how much of Harry’s attention is -- unavoidably -- fixed on him, he never recovers that spark of focus or personality.

He is a fragment of an echo, a scrap that remains once...

Harry swallows.

This fragmented thing, huddling in the body -- just a few seconds of hissing speech, confusion, panic -- is what is left. The dementors have gotten the rest.

And that is why Azkaban is quiet.

Harry blinks slowly in the dark. Morfin repeats himself again. Fragmented. Jerky. A few hissing words in the dark.

Nevertheless, he reaches for Harry, just as all the apparitions do.

Morfin’s bony fingers grip Harry’s shoulder -- nine of them, like frozen claws. The touch is so much worse than the clinging hands of the dead in London. Harry can feel Morfin’s touch not just through his clothing but through his skin, in his veins and in his bones. It steals his breath.

His heart pounds a frantic beat like a captive, held prisoner behind his ribs, like a wild thing demanding to be let out.

“--Evans!” says a rough voice, right by his head, and a huge, burning hand lands upon his shoulder, right where Morfin’s --

\-- Morfin isn’t touching Harry because Morfin is dead.

Harry blinks and rips his hand away from the body.

He is alive. He is in a dim and grim stone room off an office on an island, where his feet are on the ground and the chill is biting fiercely into his skin.

Crabbe pulls his hand away from Harry’s shoulder and there is a strange tap-tap-tap as a rain of tiny ice crystals comes free and strikes the stone floor.

“All right there?” Crabbe asks slowly, flexing his fingers. Wetness gleams on them in the dim light.

“Er, yes,” says Harry, sounding terribly distant even to himself. He shifts upon his heels and frost crunches gently underfoot. “Sorry, he says, and then, blithely: “allergies.”

Crabbe nods seriously, like this makes perfect sense and isn’t something absurd Harry just made up because Crabbe is stupid enough to believe it, and he goes on and says, “I’ve a great aunt who goes lavender all over when there’s unicorn hair nearby, myself.”

Harry learns something new, and weird, about the wizarding world every day.

“Right. Yeah,” he nods, because apparently allergies are actually a completely reasonable excuse for why he might ice over in the presence of a dead body. “Erm, sorry, did you find his things, or..?”

He holds no great hope that Morfin’s belongings will contain anything useful, and he is right: some old clothes with bone buttons, a pocket watch that doesn’t work and the three pieces of a thoroughly broken wand.

Harry eyes the wand, thinking of Hagrid’s pink umbrella. He wonders if the shards will do him any good. He remembers Hagrid’s wand, but he also remembers when Ron broke his wand in their second year, after all. Snapped wands are not really made equal.

He doesn’t voice any of his thoughts on these matters to Crabbe, but if he can use Morfin’s wand it’ll be very useful to him. For one, there’ll be no Trace on that wand. It could be very useful indeed.

Azkaban is quiet, except for the sea. Harry doesn’t trust that quiet.

Harry thanks Crabbe politely and heads back to the Floo with the big man’s rote and insincere ‘sorry for your loss’ echoing in his ears.

Harry is more than ready to leave.  



	9. Chapter 9

The fire is pleasantly warm, especially compared to the icy Azkaban chill. The ice in Harry’s clothes and hair melts immediately and he steps dripping out of the hearth at the Leaky Cauldron.

It’s immediately noisier. Azakaban was awful but it was silent. In the common room of the Leaky Cauldron, Harry can hear all sorts of voices, despite how sparsely populated it is this early in the day.

“...a machine that knits, now,” says one voice, and another overlaps, softer and more distantly, for all that they are yelling, “--step outside and answer the charges!”

Harry closes his eyes, letting it wash over him for a second, adjusting.

“Go for a swim, lad?” Tom calls out with good, if bemused, cheer. Harry glances up at him. It isn’t crowded this early, and there is a clear line of sight from the bar.

Tom is nut-brown and wrinkled, but not quite as old as Harry remembers. He has less of a stoop and moves more fluidly. He hasn’t paid attention -- every time he’s been through the pub before now, Harry has been doing his best to avoid eye contact with anyone.

But Tom is alive in the year Harry left, so he must be alive now. It follows that unless he has a mysteriously identical dead relative who dresses the same and died in the pub, Tom is perfectly real.

Harry clutches the bag of Morfin’s things -- and hair, and his finger -- in one fist and frantically smoothes down his fringe with the other hand. There’s no reason for most people to know his actual face - yet - since they haven’t seen Harry at all since infancy at least. But the scar on his forehead is famous, distinctive and fiercely resistant to any kind of disguise.

“Ah, no -- allergies,” Harry says, since it worked so well last time.

“Oh, poor thing,” says a very old-sounding, hooded witch at the bar. Her cup is full - very full -- of firewhisky. “Had a newphew just like that. Couldn’t go near a kneazle for love or money.”

Even Tom is nodding sympathetically. Weird.

He’s dripping slightly, he realises, in long wet streaks. The fire hisses behind him. “Erm,” he says, peering at his trainers. “Sorry.”

Tom makes a noise that might be stifled laughter and flicks his wand at Harry -- who twitches at the sudden movement, and whose own hand jerks toward his wand only to grasp at thin air. A drying charm shivers over him, soft and warm.

Harry ducks his head. He shoves at his hair again, because the drying charm makes him look like a hedgehog, and might reveal the scar.

“Oh, duck,” says the witch, between tipsy giggles. “Tom, you should have left it wet. That wasn't so bad."

"Er, thanks," Harry says. He doesn’t let himself get caught up in the witch’s chatter. Tom seems ready to humour her anyway, in the manner of friendly barmen everywhere.

Outside, he is ruthless with his fringe until his hair sticks up everywhere except for the part that falls above his eyes.

The apothecary in Diagon Alley is blessedly empty -- the whole Alley seems deserted, in fact, it being after ten but before midday on a working day well before school letters go out. Harry remembers what his potion needs by rote at this point, but even as he collects ingredients in the dark, rustling, pungent apothecary shop he can’t help but feel some concerns. They bubble to the surface like something vile left in a cauldron on the flame.

What if, despite all the odds, he doesn’t remember the potion correctly? What if someone in one of these shops recognises him? What if the staff aren’t real, but are actually dead, and Harry ends up talking to another dead person in public? What if the staff recognise the combinations of ingredients he’s buying?

Harry thinks of all these things and knows all of them, intellectually, to be pretty absurd. Being recognised is a true concern, but as long as he keeps his hair pushed forward and his head down -- literally -- he doesn’t need to worry about the other things. Any ingredient he can purchase in a Diagon Alley apothecary is perfectly legal, even if it has unsavoury off-label uses. And, well, presumably nobody sees a ten year old grab a paper twist of henbane and thinks _goodness me, must be Dark Arts afoot._

Even if they could put something like that together from the ingredients Harry is gathering, he reassures himself by observing the staff, who are disinterested at best. They don’t care what he’s brewing, as long as he has the money to pay for his ingredients. That’s a relief.

Harry has the money to pay. And he knows where the ancient looking brass register is, and he knows that if he just brings his things to it the shop girl will arrive and weigh them and charge him, so he really doesn’t have to pay any attention to the cold fingers that tug at him or the voices that whisper complaints in his ears.

“Have a good day,” she says, bored. Harry makes an uncommitted humming noise, just in case _that’s_ not quite real either.

His childish arms aren’t big enough for all the bags, and he certainly won’t be able to carry the books he needs as well. He pauses just inside the door to do some rearranging. Awkwardly, Harry stuffs a pouch of powdered oleander and a tiny jar of dead beetles into his pockets. They bulge.

He steps outside with his nerves already singing with relief.

Honestly, as an adult, in his own time, if he’d come to the apothecary and bought something... well, the list of possible potions stood a strong chance of being published in Witch Weekly the following week.

Despite everything, it’s nice to exist, for now, as a relative unknown. He checks his fringe again. So far so good.

Harry steels himself and picks up some of the references he knows he’ll need from Flourish & Blotts -- _Spell Component Substitutions_ , for one. It is still in its third edition, which surprises him briefly and ridiculously. He rolls his eyes at himself. He gets a copy of _Advanced Potion Making_ , despite his mixed feelings about the book. It dedicates at least four chapters to the topic at a NEWT level, which makes it a good resource in this case. He also picks up a copy of the _Ingredient Encyclopaedia_ , which is a long shot but may prove helpful.

“Someone’s got a knack for potions, huh?” the witch at the register asks, flicking her wand over a book where his purchases are inscribed by means of an enchanted quill. It has untidy handwriting and violet ink.

“They’re for my mum.” He tries to avoid her eyes. He’s pretty sure she’s alive -- she takes his money like she’s alive, and it lands solidly in her hand. Her hand seems cold and he flinches, but -- it’s not icy like the dead. She’s real.

“You’re a good lad to pick them up for her,” she says, putting his purchases in a huge brown paper bag and turning the edges in to make it into a package. “If I tried to get my youngest to do something like this --” she shudders theatrically.

With an idle flick of her fingers a twine ball floats out from beneath her desk and ties the package neatly. Wandless magic. Huh. That usually means somebody is either very powerful -- like Dumbledore or Voldemort were -- are, _are_ \-- or that she has a lot of practice casting exactly the same simple spell. Harry’s seen Molly wandlessly stir things on her stoves, half absent-minded, and Remus used to send used tea bags zooming toward the bins without lifting a finger.

If it’s magic she uses for work, she’s probably _really_ practised.

“Thanks,” he says, taking his package.

“...have my daughter whoring herself to that filthy mudblood,” murmurs someone, just as he’s giving her another nervous smile, and Harry isn’t sure if it’s real or not, but he ignores it with his jaw clenched. He’s sure his smile looks fixed.

He has hopes for this potion, but he’s also got a lot of misgivings. It depends a lot on skills he doesn’t necessarily have, yes, but it also depends... well, Harry’s not completely certain the potion will be possible using the ingredients he has. There are usually reasons potions call for specific ingredients.

Admittedly, the cramped bathroom of an indifferently clean, cheap hotel isn’t the ideal spot for complex brewing. Neither is a girls’ loo, though, so he knows he’s done just fine in worse circumstances. Here he won’t be interrupted, at least.

Gawaine Gaunt’s potion is mostly stable. Most of the complexity is in preparation and timing, not in brewing technique, for which Harry is also grateful.

Still, even Snape wouldn’t have pushed a class to make a potion this complex until sixth or seventh year, and his curriculum was notoriously advanced -- or. It is advanced. Snape’s curriculum _is_ advanced. He’s still alive and teaching now.

Harry doesn’t think about Severus Snape very often. When he does it is with a complicated mix of anger, confusion and discomfort. For all that his motives seem simple in the end, it’s hard to reconcile them with his behaviour over the years. Especially from the vantage of an adult.

Harry doesn’t think of Snape often at all but it is natural to think of him when he brews. The odd thing is, Harry likes to think of people in black and white terms, and that’s hard with Snape. He almost certainly won them the war. He was -- is, is, he’s alive now -- someone Harry regards as one of the bravest men ever to breathe.

It’s a weird thought for Harry, that a person can be brave and good and dead clever and simultaneously such a complete, perfect cunt. 

Right now he can almost hear Snape explaining at length what Harry’s doing wrong in his familiar, snide and drawling voice. Unfortunately, the commentary of Harry’s internal Snape doesn’t even have the benefit of being corrective -- every time he chops or dices or crushes, he second-guesses the action, wondering if he should be using silver or copper, wondering if he needs more even edges or finer chopping or...

There are many things a person can do wrong when he’s making potions. Harry worries about every one of them.

He knows the recipe. It’s clear in his mind. But every step has a soft _you’re doing it badly, Potter, were you paying no attention at all or are you just naturally dim?_ in it, and he grinds his teeth. He knows nothing messes up magic quite like a belief that it’ll fail.

Harry is really glad that, of all of the dead who have visited him, none of his old teachers have shown up. He’s not sure how well he could tolerate that. In his previous timeline he never went anywhere it might have come up, of course, but he’s grateful nonetheless.

There’s a method specified in one of his books for getting usable blood from dead flesh, generally intended for use with dragons, but it comes with sixteen caveats and warnings.

Harry puts his gloves on and tries it anyway, careful with the flesh of Morfin’s finger. It smells like old meat now, in the absence of any of those spells to stop it. Harry feels like he’s sort of inured to the reek of the dead, but stripping the partially-decomposed fleshy bits away from the bone still tests the strength of his stomach.

He knows he’s fine when it’s an animal, but his brain won’t let him forget that he’s working with body parts from Morfin Gaunt.

Of course a phial of fresh red blood is too much to ask, he thinks bitterly. Had to be a bloody decomposing finger.

Even when Harry follows the methodology to the letter, the blood it gives him is... wrong. Inconsistent, with a reeking watery part floating to the top as it settles.

It’s too old.

It’s just... too old.

Grimly he tries it anyway, and his first potion goes worse than any he or Hermione ever tried. He wants to try it badly enough that he puts some of the smoking purple stuff on the back of his arm to test, but -- but it turns his skin grey, and sickly purple lines begin to creep out from it.

It doesn’t look promising.

Harry’s fingers go numb. He waits it out, uncertain, until the pain starts.

It’s... definitely eating through his skin.

He washes it off with salty water and shaking hands. His skin is burnt under it.

He has to use the hair, then, which is equally hard for different reasons. The first time, he wonders if he might have burnt it, but -- no. It just smells like burnt hair because that’s the change he’s made to the ingredients...

He hopes.

Maybe he’s not making the potion correctly at all, he thinks. He makes it again, using his own blood as a substitute for the Gaunt blood he needs. It looks almost exactly like Hermione’s version -- maybe a shade off from hers, but still very close.

The golden sheen over the top of it is perfectly correct, too. He’s definitely doing it exactly right -- he trusts Hermione to have gotten it right, even when he doesn’t strictly trust himself.

It is sort of comforting to know that the problem is the substitution, at least. At least he doesn’t have _two_ massive problems here.

The second attempt colours everything the smoke touches bright red and he can’t for the life of him dispel it. He’ll need a wand.

Well. That will certainly be... something to explain to the hotel staff. Maybe he can check out before they make that discovery...

He doesn't sleep. When he tries, he wakes over and over, icy cold and with the press of fingers on him - on his legs, on his ribs, on his mouth. It's not worth it. 

His sixth attempt is no closer than his fourth, and although it certainly makes him dizzy and sick when he tries it, it has no impact at all on the spirits when he steps outside to check. The man in the car park is still there, and Harry’s attention just encourages him to turn, looking in confusion, like a lost stranger hearing a distant call of his name.

Harry shuts the door quickly. Nope.

On the eighth attempt, Harry gets risky and snips in a tiny chip of Mofin’s wandwood. From the books he’s been reading it seems like a good idea at the time -- his wandwood should, arguably, contain the essence of the wizard who used it for so long in much the same way his blood would. Sort of.

Harry is tired and stressed beyond measure, and feeling very desperate.

Of course, the dark walnut is also _wood_ , and it has all the other properties of wood.

The eighth potion sets off the fire alarms for the whole hotel. He, and all the other guests, are standing on the street half-dressed in the cold while the fire department tries to figure out whether there is actually any danger.

Harry tells them his mother was out and he was trying to cook. He gets a stern talking to from the helmeted fire officer.

He feels exhausted.

 


	10. Chapter 10

The hotel staff remain blessedly indifferent and incurious, but Harry knows he can’t keep pushing the boundaries of their disinterest like this -- there are, after all, precisely zero adults out on the street with him when they evacuate the building. Nobody will believe his parents are out on business forever.

Harry is running out of time. Soon -- within days, he’s pretty sure -- he’ll receive his Hogwarts letter. And then he’ll have some uncomfortable decisions to make, too.

He knows that the Hogwarts owl will find him, even shut away in this dismal room in his out-of-the-way muggle hotel. He has already determined to attend school -- even if it hadn't been the single best part of his childhood the first time around, and it certainly had, more than one person is expecting him and there’s no good way to explain his present circumstances without implicating himself in serious criminal activity. So the owl will find him, and Harry will answer, and he’s not quite sure what will happen next, not least because nobody could expect muggles to navigate Diagon Alley, but the first time he did this he remembers it being... more turbulent.

What happens to muggleborn students whose families don’t pack up and flee the mainland in a fit of hysterics?

Harry has no proof, but he suspects it must be awfully restful to have relatives who are marginally more in touch with reality than the Dursleys.

Still, wondering how he’s going to navigate this business of his Hogwarts letter without somehow interacting with the Dursleys again this summer causes Harry some anxiety -- which gives him kind of a break from his anxiety about his increasingly catastrophic potioneering efforts.

Nothing at all will give Harry a break from the dead, though. He hears them more and more, and their voices are getting louder. There’s a woman in her mid-twenties who must have died in room #7 here. Harry hears her sobbing at all hours now, although he’s only ever caught glimpses of her through the door of her room when it’s left open.

The paying occupants of her room don’t notice her at all, much as Harry couldn’t hear her clearly when he first arrived.

It ... It might just be that he gets used to the old echoes of death the longer he remains in a given place, and that he can sense and feel more of them as he starts to pick the stimuli apart. It doesn’t have to mean that he’s becoming more sensitive.

It probably does. But it doesn't _have_ to.

Maybe, he thinks tiredly, he should be treating this like a medical condition or a curse or something. He can’t go to a healer and say ‘hey, I united the Deathly Hallows and now boy am I in trouble,’ because that would certainly raise a lot of questions, but maybe he should be looking at it like a disease.

There are some things -- famous wizarding panaceas that are rare and powerful, mostly, or else hard to obtain because of the sheer difficulty of the magic involved -- that are supposed to be able to cure any serious diseases. Harry knows of them, vaguely, and mostly through Hermione.

None of them are accessible to Harry anyway. There’s something unappetisingly named ‘ichor’, which is a kind of “gods’ blood”, taken from some Greek beast that may or may not be extinct; amrita, supposedly obtained only through an extremely taxing and very obscure series of Indian rituals which Harry would not even be allowed to learn about; Chinese pántáo, which do actually exist -- but which grow once a century, from a single, closely guarded tree in the middle of wizarding Beijing, which only the richest of the rich are even allowed to view; the Elixir of Life...

That one’s probably the most accessible, but the production of it requires an understanding of alchemy so advanced that it’s just not practicable to make, and certainly not if all Harry’s going to do is guzzle it and hope for the best. It might not even fix anything -- because his problem might not be something the magic considers a sickness or a curse. Still, if the lone extant Philosopher’s Stone hadn’t been destroyed in 1992 --

And Harry pauses. His train of thought comes dramatically off its rails.

Because...

It’s 1991 now.

Which means... which means the Philosopher’s Stone’s actually going to be at Hogwarts. Harry doesn’t need to know anything about alchemy. He just needs... light fingers.

He lays back on the cramped hotel bed and thinks about it through the soft sobbing of the dead woman somewhere far off to his left.

It’s a long shot, but he doesn’t have a lot to lose, does he? And he’ll be at Hogwarts with the Stone all year. It will require a comparatively small amount of time and effort on his behalf.

He even knows how to get it from the Mirror of Erised, doesn’t he? He’s done that before.

Harry chews his bottom lip.

If he can’t get anything out of the potion, he thinks, he’ll try it. If nothing else, the Elixir of Life certainly won’t hurt him, unlike a lot of other harebrained, long-shot solutions.

He stays up that night because sleep is beyond him, and instead of another fruitless effort at the potion he applies himself to Morfin’s old wand.

Unlike Ron’s old one, which was unicorn hair, Morfin’s wand has a core of dragon heartstring -- like Hagrid’s, if Harry remembers correctly. That gives him some hope that it will be salvageable.

He crosses the deserted road and the parking lot and gets tape at the service station, ignoring the dubious looks of the cashier under the fluorescent lights. On the way back the dead accident victim who wanders the parking lot tries to talk to him, and Harry turns and flees and comes back around the long way.

The scratched table is waiting for him and the chair still feels too big for his strange, small body. He cuts off big slices of the tape and affixes their very tips to the table’s edge, leaving long lengths dangling in the air and ready to use.

Morfin’s wand he lays out, carefully lining up the broken pieces. The wood is exceptionally dark in the yellowish light of the hotel room. Harry thinks it’s probably important to line up the core as closely as possible. The dagon heartstring is stiff and dry, which is helpful in this operation -- he can’t imagine how fiddly this would be with phoenix feathers.

The dragon heartstring also belongs to a thing that is long dead. Harry realises this when he reaches for it and stops his hand mid-gesture.

Dragons aren’t humans, obviously.

But they’re magical.

He’s been making potions with dead things, surely --

He pauses. Licks his lips.

It is a painful relief when he touches the core and nothing happens.

When he has the chipped wood and dragon heartstring as closely aligned as his painstaking attention can make it, Harry rolls the tape around the breaks, creating a thick silvery segmentation. He does it twice, and by the time he’s finished his eyes feel strange from the strain.

The wand is... bad. It’s bad. Worse, even, than using a wand not rightfully won from its owner. It sparks angrily from the breaks when he tries a simple spell with it, and begins to smell of melting plastics almost immediately. The amount of will and concentration required to get even the simplest spells to work is staggering.

Harry starts with basics. Green sparks, a pinpoint of light. Lumos takes three tries and lights up with a strangely reddish glow, like the dull burn of a flash light shone through someone’s hand.

It responds to him, and it does not backfire or blow up, so Harry has a wand.

Or... well, no. Harry has an ugly stick which is sometimes, unreliably, also a wand.

It’s better than no wand at all.

By four Harry is tired enough to sleep. He dreams again of dead things until his head feels swollen and glutted with them, with dying breaths and confused questions and whispering lamentations. He fills up with things that are stiff and frozen.

Harry wakes with a jerk to he slam of a car door outside, to grey light through the windows, to the cheerful screech of somebody’s child.

There is ice on the sheets and on his clothes and his skin, and a barn owl is tapping angrily at his window. His skin is cold and discoloured and his joints are numb and clumsy.

There’s ice on the sheets.

Harry staggers up, struggles with the window. His fingers are trembling. A blast of air from outside tosses the flimsy curtains around when he finally unlatches it. He shudders wildly. The owl makes a reproachful noise and descends to perch on the back of the chair.

He ignores the owl and goes to the bathroom, where discovers he slept with his glasses on. In the mirror he sees the frost on his eyelashes and swallows. His throat hurts. He feels sick. He isn't sure what's going on. 

The hotel's water pressure is poor, but the ice melts and washes away in the shower within minutes and Harry feels warm and human -- and alive -- again. He wonders distantly if he’s made a mistake -- taken a strange dream or a vision with him into the waking world, or made this up in a weird flight of fancy. But when he emerges again, red-skinned and bemused in a cloud of steam, there is water on the bed linens.

It’s soaking through to the mattress.

He stares at it apathetically for a few minutes, wondering. He could dry it out, but --

The owl shifts her feathers impatiently. They fluff up and settle down with a dry rustling noise.

Harry turns away from the bed. Let the hotel staff deal with it. They’ve seen worse. The woman in #7 won’t stop sobbing. It’s giving Harry a fierce headache. Well. No. He woke up with a fierce headache, but it's still not helping.

He turns to the owl. It's carrying his Hogwarts letter. And despite all his anxieties he doesn’t overthink it. He pens his notice of acceptance and sends it back to Hogwarts with the impatient owl.

Harry would like to be the sort of person who can meticulously plan out a series of events like this, who can account for all factors and pick out exactly the path that will lead to the destination he requires -- one where he arrives at school and nobody asks any uncomfortable questions about his home life.

Unfortunately, Harry isn’t the kind of person to whom that kind of organisational skill comes naturally on a good day, and he hasn’t had a good day in...

He closes his eyes and tries to block out he sound of the dead woman crying four rooms away. It is inescapable and it rings like a clarion in his head.

He hasn’t had a good day in a while.

The owl wings away silently, heedless of the stumbling dead man in the car park. Whatever happens... happens.

It is moot in the end: ten hours later, a new bird arrives to inform him that someone will be by to collect him and show him where he can get his school things on August first, and could he please make himself ready promptly at eleven at his place of residence.

Harry is staring at another failed brew when it does arrive, wondering if he should try a dose anyway. Maybe it will surprise him. But, no, it smells like unlaundered socks set on fire and he knows that no potion that smells like that is brewed correctly. _Sanus aeris_ is the spell to strip impurities from the air, but it works poorly with his broken wand, so Harry is forced to open a window and turn the fans on like any regular muggle.

The soundtrack of the dead woman crying is persistent, although by now he’s also brewed the simplest pain reliever he knows and his headache is only a dull thump alongside his pulse.

When the owl finally comes through his window he’s grateful for the break.

This letter is penned in McGonagall’s precise hand instead of by magically enchanted quill, and it gives Harry a weird pang to see it so stark in cobalt ink on the page. The front of the envelope reads ‘Mr Harry Potter, #4 Privet Drive’, and he wonders if perhaps his residence at the hotel has gone unnoticed amid all the other first year letters.

If the owl was looking for him in Surrey, it’s little wonder the poor thing’s taken ten hours to get here.

He waves it away from the sludge in is cauldron and instead pours it a saucer of water.

Harry wonders how it will play out, if somebody comes to get him from Privet Drive. Can he wait out the front and insist that the Dursleys don’t want to know about anything to do with magic? That would be in the character of the family, at least. Will they send Hagrid again? He hopes so. If McGonagall is who comes to get him, she will know something isn’t quite right immediately -- and so will Dumbledore, although he’ll be more inclined to go along with Harry’s clumsy dissembling.

 _What if they send Snape,_ he thinks, suddenly alarmed, but --

But surely Harry hasn’t done anything to deserve that, and there’s no reason to send Snape. There’s no reason to send Hagrid, really, either, but --

Surely Snape would refuse.

Surely Dumbledore wouldn’t try to turn Harry off school before he’d even set foot inside it.

August is a week and change away yet, anyway. Harry has, just, _so_ many utterly unsuccessful potions to brew between now and then.


	11. Chapter 11

The potions are unsuccessful. Only two of them catch fire, owing to the relative stability of the brew, but the fumes from several are noxious - more practice with _sanus aeris_ , which is only marginally more successful over time using Morfin's wand - and of the two that seem reasonable enough to try, one makes him violently sick.

The other one puts him to sleep for so long that he almost doesn't make it back to Surrey in time to meet whoever the school sends for him anyway.

Harry wakes with bleary eyes and an aching throat, but there's no ice this time - and no dreams, that he remembers. It's the best rest he's had in months. He rolls over, grunting quietly at how stiff he is - that's not something he's used to anymore, since his body is eleven and spectacularly bendy and pliable again - and lays eyes on the glowing numbers of the bedside clock.

It doesn't register for a few moments.

And then it does.

Harry makes a despairing noise and stumbles up, fumbling for his busted wand in the bedsheets. The room looks like a bomb site, and he has to catch a bus in ten minutes.

He vanishes the coagulated results of his efforts away with a panicked wave of the wand, which works by vanishing the whole cauldron and the motel kettle. He considers it an improvement despite how annoying it will be later, since a missing kettle will be a lot easier to explain to housekeeping should they come by in his absence than a cauldron full of vile potion leavings. The ingredients he throws into their bags and shoves beneath the bed. Then he jams his feet into some secondhand trainers, grabs a jacket and a jumper and races out the door.

He body-checks the dead man in the car park completely by accident, feeling an icy, wet squelch where its bloodied body connects with his. The shock of ice that shoots up his bones is horrific, but it also wakes him up the rest of the way. That's certainly one way to shock himself into awareness.

"Hey," says the body, and Harry shoves past without responding. His hands go numb where they touch it.

Harry dashes to the bus stop and only by the grace of an exceptionally kind driver does he make it onto the bus - the man sees him running and slows for him, even though Harry is certainly not waiting at the stop where he ought to be.

Recently, Harry has come to like certain categories of people. People driving muggle vehicles are right up the top of the list. This is because muggle vehicles aren't _alive,_ so they can't appear as part of the conga line of horrifying dead things Harry sees on the regular, but they also don't move without someone in the driver's seat - which means _somebody alive_ is always definitely driving them.

Harry can always rely upon the driver of a bus or a car to be a real, solid, living person. It's not a thing he used to consider in judging whether or not he liked interacting with someone... but Harry's standards have dropped a lot recently.

"Cutting it fine," the driver says, eyeing Harry over his enormous spectacles. Their magnification makes his eyes seem grossly oversized, these large and unsettling orbs set in his pale face.

"Overslept," Harry says, and gives him the bus fare. He at least has correct change for that.

"Obviously," grunts the driver, and his judgemental gaze lingers on Harry's hair.

Harry twitches and makes an effort to flatten it, but his hair pretty much always looks the same, whether he's slept on it or not. His efforts are not well-received by his hair, which flops aggressively upwards as soon as he lets go, in defiance of all reason and gravity. Some things can't be helped.

There's a woman bleeding from what looks like a bullet wound in the broad back seat, so Harry sits right up the front. He pulls his jacket on while he's sitting there, and only then thinks to wonder if it's possible to get the gory bits of dead people stuck on him. He knows only he would be able to see it either way, but - but it doesn't stop Harry from pulling up the hem of his jumper and inspecting his tee shirt nervously.

Huh. There's still stuff in the pockets of his clothes from his shopping trip to Diagon Alley - dead beetles, an open bag of powdered plant material that threatens to spill with every dip and bump of the road. He has lost count of days, but he's pretty sure that shopping trip was a while back now...

He closes his eyes and falls into a doze again. Voices mumble to him in his sleep and cold hands pull at him. He wakes up with a jolt when the driver loudly announces the end of the line, and he finds himself so cold he's almost sick with it, but not iced over - which is good, because that would be hard to explain to a muggle.

His connecting bus is more of the same, although he has a lady driver this time. She regards his hair with exactly the same air of _I'm not judging you_ _ **aloud**_ that the previous driver had given it.

Harry ignores it, of course, but he does notice. This bus is devoid of dead people in its seats. At one point during the journey it speeds right through an elderly woman on the road and nobody but Harry so much as twitches.

He wonders what the dead of Hogwarts will be like. He hopes there aren't many of them. There are the real ghosts, of course, like Nick and the Baron and the Grey Lady, which is well and good. But Harry's not sure if the castle has been the site of a lot of deaths. _Hogwarts: A History_ would probably be able to help him there, but he knows even as he thinks about it that he's not going to get a copy.

Privet Drive, with its orderly rows of suburban homes and aggressively neat gardens, has not changed in the time Harry's been gone. It has not missed him, nor, as far as he can tell, even noticed his absence.

That's to be expected. Had Dudley gone missing there'd be a poster on every lamp post, but all the difference Harry sees when he walks slowly toward #4 is that Aunt Petunia's roses have started to wilt a little. This he notices with some satisfaction.

The dead here haven't changed, either, and Harry plants himself beneath the shade of a big tree - one that blocks the view from Petunia's window, incidentally - and steadfastly ignores the dead boy in his long shorts and suspenders. He is aware of him, and sees him wandering from the corners of his eyes on a path that takes him up and down the road and which cuts right through the Dursley's yard. They'd be furious if they knew.

Even just thinking about him seems to draw the little boy's attention, and his confused meandering path circles closer and closer to Harry.

Harry notices. He can't help it. He notices, and that means he's thinking about the dead boy again, and he grinds his teeth as the boy wanders closer with every confused step.

Harry stares on ahead at the trimmed hedges growing around the garden at #7, and he does his best to think about those instead. The hedge is, appropriately, privet. Evergreen, he thinks loudly and doggedly, ignoring the shape of the boy moving his way. If you're not absolutely rubbish at potions, you can use privet leaves to help with stomach problems and the bark to help with ulcers and bowel problems - or, if you like, the fruit and flowers to induce them. Not that any muggle would, of course, and most wizards have more efficient ways to cure or poison one another, but -

The shape just keeps coming closer.

Harry takes the opportunity to head over to the neighbours' decorative hedge and strip it of a branch or two. Nobody's home, anyway: their car is gone.

The dead boy seems confused once Harry crosses the street, and while Harry is muttering to himself all the old things about stem structure he thought he'd forgotten, it seems to become distracted.

By the cracked face of Harry's watch, it's ten past. That means that, whoever might be coming to get him, it's not McGonagall and it's not Snape.

Even when Harry knew her as headmistress and no meeting could start without her, McGonagall never once took advantage. If McGonagall says she'll be somewhere at eleven, she gets there at ten fifty nine and no later. Harry isn't sure how she manages it, but honestly, Percy and Hermione are exactly the same way. Perhaps it's a kind of magic they don't teach at Hogwarts.

And Snape... well, Harry recalls that Snape has a tendency toward punctuality only because it affords him the chance to be annoyed with everybody who arrives after him, but he's still almost always on time.

That's a relief. Harry didn't _really_ think they'd send Snape, but sometimes Dumbledore can be... very unpredictable.

It could be Sprout, of course, or Dumbledore himself, or it could be -

"And here he is!" booms a voice Harry hasn't heard in months - maybe even years by now. He was not a good visitor for a time even before he lost his mind and decided time travel was a good idea.

Yes, thinks Harry, feeling a grin break over his face, it could be Hagrid.

He turns when the huge man's shadow falls over him. Hagrid looks positively wild, striding down the neat and quiet environment of Privet Drive. He makes all the cars and fences and half the houses look like children's toys next to his bulk. His hair is a bushy mass and his beard is enormous and tangled, and between them are his eyes, peering out, small and dark and shining from all that wild hair.

"Rubeus Hagrid, Keeper of Keys and Grounds at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry," he introduces himself without delay, beaming down upon Harry. Hagrid's friendly and wholesome regard is a powerful thing: it's not very often Harry encounters fully grown adults who are just genuinely happy to meet him, without any strange expectations fostered by his reputation.

He goes on brightly, unaware of Harry's thoughts: "And of course I know who you are. Haven't seen you since you was a baby, Harry."

Harry can't help but smile widely back, although to be fair he doesn't much try to stop himself. "Hagrid," he says, which he immediately knows is too familiar and too informal, but Hagrid doesn't notice. Harry blinks rapidly. "Hi. Good - good to meet you."

It comes out awkwardly, because 'good to meet you' is so out of touch with what Harry's thinking, but if a little awkwardness is the worst thing that happens he'll be happy.

"You've probably heard this before," Hagrid says, looking him up and down in inspection. His dialect is all familiar west country, straight out of - of somewhere near the Forest of Dean, really - with the hard endings clipped off words here and there and full of _yeh_ and _yer_ and _what was_ , and Harry has missed it in an odd way, "but you do look very much like your dad. Got your mum's eyes, though."

Yeah. Harry's heard that one once or twice (a month) before. But all he says is, "My Aunt and Uncle don't really like to talk a lot about my parents. Did you know them?"

"Know them?" Hagrid snorts. "I spent - feels like half my life - chasing your dad out of the Forest." He glances around the street. More than one bored muggle housewife is twitching back her curtains to peer surreptitiously out at them - although thankfully Petunia is either otherwise occupied or from home right now, because the pale lacy curtains in the windows at #4 are still.

"Come on," Hagrid says loudly. "Plenty to do today. We can chat on the way-"

And so they leave. Harry notices the dead boy on their way, but he doesn't come closer and he doesn't reach for Harry.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note for this chapter: the timeline actually works out for Harry to be in Diagon Alley on the first of August -- I just completely forgot when Harry's birthday was because I'm Like That. This note is here to alleviate timeline confusion, not because I take joy in admitting my mistakes.

The journey to London with Hagrid is more difficult than Harry remembers, even though they’re not navigating from a barren spit of rock in the middle of the sea this time. Hagrid draws all sorts of attention because of his sheer size, and it doesn’t help that he comments loudly on perfectly ordinary things like the turnstile at the underground. More than once he stops and bellows things like, “The things muggles come up with!” in amazement.

Harry cannot remember if Hagrid was this bad at navigating the muggle world with the slightest hint of discretion back when he was actually eleven. It doesn’t seem like something he should have forgotten because, once he puts his referred embarrassment in a box, it’s hilarious.

For Harry’s part, he is pleasantly surprised to find that despite how many people they must see every day, the train carriages on which they ride are home to very few echoes of the dead. The platforms themselves are quite another matter -- there are a surprising number of stumbling, bleeding spectres on the platforms, and at least one screaming face attached to the front grate of a train.

“All right, Harry?” Hagrid asks him, peering down with his huge brows somehow beetling even harder in concern.

The only reason Harry can even hear Hagrid is because the man has no concept of an indoor voice. Otherwise the despairing howl of whoever once threw themselves in front of the train drowns out pretty much everything.

“I don’t like platforms,” Harry says, and two or three people nearby startle and turn to glance his way. He knows immediately that he is speaking too loudly, trying to be heard over the screaming that nobody else notices. A woman wrinkles her nose and shifts warily away.

Hagrid doesn’t seem to notice. “I can understand that,” he says, nodding. “Be over soon, though, won’t it?”

Harry nods. It will. And meanwhile the noise goes on and on.

Hagrid mutters darkly about his seat on the train -- too small, of course, since he takes up at least two of them -- and all the other commuters watch them surreptitiously over the edges of their papers and paperbacks.

“At least it’s not peak hour,” Harry points out as he helps Hagrid through the barrier again at the other end. “It’s mad when everyone’s going to work.”

Hagrid grunts, but doesn’t seem to find that particularly edifying. His spirits restore themselves rapidly though, and by the time they’ve run the gauntlet of the stairs back up and out he’s ready to loudly marvel at ordinary muggle objects again.

Harry looks upon the parking meters that capture Hagrid’s attention with a similar surprise, although for very different reasons. In the time he comes from, the parking meters all take credit cards -- and most of them advertise some kind of program that runs on a mobile phone through which a motorist can pay instead. Harry doesn’t know much more about it, because such a piece of muggle technology would never work inside Grimmauld Place. Still, it’s been years since he’s seen a meter like this on any street.

It’ll be years before he sees one of the new ones again.

It’s a weird thought, and Harry blinks to himself, then turns back to Hagrid and intentionally doesn’t think on that any further.

It occurs to Harry then, very belatedly, that he hasn’t expressed any curiosity at all about the magical world to Hagrid. He knows where they’re going, of course, but it might be better to pretend he doesn’t. Hagrid is incurious and willing to take people at face value, but Dumbledore will definitely ask questions about this outing...

He ignores the dead of London -- easier, actually, when he knows Hagrid is alive and all he has to do is follow him down the road. Hagrid clears a path faster than a reductor curse, and his huge stride is as quick as Harry could ask -- certainly quicker than the pace of most of the dead things that hound him. As they go, Harry finally gives in and peppers him with questions he already knows the answers to. Where are they going? Can they really get all this in London? And so on.

The Leaky Cauldron is as small and grubby as ever, and the daytime clientele is precisely what Harry expects: elderly ladies gossipping over tiny glasses of sherry, a hooded shape in the dark corner farthest from the fire, an array of people stopping by for lunch while out and about on business in Diagon Alley. There’s a lean and ragged man stirring the sugar into his tea with a wiggle of his fingers, all idle and effortless, practised at it. And there are several people Harry is quite sure are not alive -- either because of their injuries or because of their clothing.

One dead man has two neat, sharp puncture marks in his neck. Harry’s never seen that before, but he knows exactly what it means.

“The usual, Hagrid?” Tom asks from behind the bar.

“Can’t,” Hagrid announces proudly. “I’m on official Hogwarts business,” and he claps one hand on Harry’s shoulder. He’s so large, and Harry is so small, that he feels the strength in it sing all the way down from his shoulders to his heels.

The pub goes silent -- except for the dead, who do not care for celebrities.

Tom squints at him for a second in confusion. For a terrible moment Harry’s stomach plummets to his feet and he wonders if Tom’s going to recognise him as someone who’s been in the pub before.

But in the end Tom’s only seen Harry before when he’s been soaking wet and muttering about ‘allergies’. It’s hard to reconcile that mess with Harry Potter, Boy Saviour, so when his eyes widen and his mouth slackens it is not with the recognition Harry dreads.

Instead he peers closely and says, “Good Lord. Is this -- Bless my soul, Harry Potter.”

There’s a beat of silence. And then, from Harry’s perspective at least, chaos breaks upon the room. Everybody scrambles up to meet him and touch him, and Hagrid stands like a towering, warm and hugely oblivious wall at his back.

“It’s an honour, a real honour --”

“--come back, Mr Potter. Welcome back!”

“I’m so proud--”

Harry feels trapped by how everyone towers over him, and he twitches at every hand that touches his. There’s no really good way to escape or decline. He can’t even properly refuse Doris Crockford, who keeps returning to shake his hand again.

Each touch he expects to be a lot icier than it is, and the more anxious Harry becomes, the more agitated the dead get in response.

“--and here’s Professor Quirrell! Didn’t see you all the way over in the corner there, sorry, Professor. Harry--”

Harry turns at Hagrid’s instruction but he already knows what he’ll find waiting for him. He didn’t notice Quirrell here, either, although now that he lays eyes upon the pale and shaky man he remembers the meeting clearly.

Around the pub, the dead move more rapidly and their voices come through loud and clear -- louder, even, than Quirrell’s greeting. It’s lucky that Harry has a good idea of what he’ll say.

Even beyond the darting eyes and shaking hands, Quirrell looks unwell. He’s not just nervous and stressed, he’s sweating and pallid. There are heavy grey bags beneath his watery eyes and his breath is coming just a little too hard for a man who’s been sitting still.

The noise of the dead rises and rises and their movements become jerky and angular and Harry, feeling unreal and very detached, looks at Quirrell’s sick face and he knows that he, too, is one of the dead. His body just hasn’t realised it yet. Voldemort is already wearing him through. Little wonder he is willing to take the kinds of risks he will -- stealing from Gringotts, from Dumbledore, drinking unicorn blood.

“Pleased to meet you, Professor Quirrell,” Harry says. He hears himself like someone speaking from a great distance. It comes out at a normal volume -- even though he can barely hear himself think. The man with the vampire bite is getting increasingly peeved that Tom won’t take his order.

Quirrell does not try to shake Harry’s hand. Harry knows why. He also wonders what would happen if he just.. sticks his hand out right now and asks to shake. How would they explain Quirrell burning alive? What would happen?

Probably he’d just refuse to shake. That would be rude, but it’s not like Harry could insist.

Even as an adult, Harry recalls with perfect, crystal clarity how it feels to burn somebody with just his touch. He still remembers the wreck of Quirrell’s face beneath his hands. It is not the sort of thing you forget.

It feels like an out of body experience when he smiles and makes brief, disjointed small talk. The dead are roaring around him by the time Hagrid herds him away. Worse still, they are beginning to notice him. They are beginning to circle.

Outside, Harry feels like he can breathe again.

“Should have warned you,” Hagrid says ruefully. “I shouldn’t have brought you there without knowing you were famous.”

“Why?” Harry asks. “Did I do something?” He’s temporising. He needs to buy the time for himself so he can calm down. There’s nothing Hagrid can tell Harry on this topic that he doesn’t already know.

“Did you _do_ something?” mutters Hagrid, in a tone of confusion and dawning horror. “What do you know about how your mum and dad died?”

When Harry first came to the wizarding world, it was with the understanding that his parents, drunk, had died in an unfortunate car accident which they had nevertheless deserved for being unemployed dole-sucking burdens upon the decent hardworking people in society. He remembers that much -- and he also remembers how furious Hagrid once was to learn that this was what he knew of them.

Harry decides to cut Hagrid this break. He’s already back in time -- might as well rewrite history while he’s here. “They said -- they said they were killed by a, er, a ‘very bad man’,” he lies, feeling that this sounds like the sort of thing people tell children when they don’t feel they’re old enough to understand details. He’s not quite sure -- nobody ever babied him like that, but he thinks of Aunt Petunia and her concern for Dudley’s disposition. Dudley is not now, nor will he ever be, the delicate flower Aunt Petunia believes him to be.

Hagrid looks like he’s swallowed a lacewing fly. “That’s not... well, they're not  _wrong_ ,” he says grudgingly. “But there’s a bit more to it.”

He takes a big breath, which seems to swell in his already enormous chest for a second before he lets it out in a deep sigh. “I s’pose you don’t... it’s... do you know his name? No, you wouldn’t,” he answers for himself, which spares Harry from having to decide how to answer.

Hagrid dithers for a moment, opening and closing his mouth like he wants to get it over with but desperately doesn’t want to actually say the name. Harry waits for him. Even after the events of the last war with the Taboo firmly prohibiting the use of the name ‘Voldemort’, Harry still doesn’t quite understand the hesitance of modern wizards to say it -- the fear of it never quite settles upon him.

Finally Hagrid takes another deep breath, working himself up to it, and then he says, “All right -- Voldemort.”

He shudders, and on a man of Hagrid’s size, it’s like a small earthquake. He explain, then, in a straightforward and simplistic way, the first war with Voldemort -- or, rather, he explains that there was one.

Hagrid’s explanation is light on details but he describes the feeling of the war very well, in a way Harry recognises from his own experiences in the late 90s. _Dark days. Terrible things. Didn’t know who to trust._

And... yeah. Yeah. Harry remembers that.

He tells Harry, too, that Lily and James were as good a witch and wizard as any he’d seen, and Harry can’t help but smile at that. He’s not sure it’s entirely true, but it’s a kind thing to tell an orphan about his parents.

Drip by drip, the rough outline of the story comes out and Harry’s smile fades. There’s no mention of Peter’s betrayal or the prophecy, but the bones are all there.

The older Harry gets, the worse he feels for his parents, even as he distances himself from the difficulties of growing up without them. He can’t help but wonder what life must have been like for them, confined to one house under the Fidelus Charm, trapped indoors with a helpless infant and the gnawing anxiety of knowing they were at the top of Voldemort’s hit list.

Harry would rather fight. He knows it, and it’s not because he’s noble or brave -- it’s because hiding, waiting, cornered like rats, for Voldemort to come for them... knowing he’d never stop and there was nobody to stop him...

Well, Harry supposes that having an infant took the choice away from them, but he’s sure the waiting would drive him mad.

“Something about _you_ finished him,” Hagrid declares to Harry, although of course it’s not true. Lily had done something -- something none of the other scores of mothers who gladly died for their children had done -- and her death had sealed it.

Harry has never found out which spell Lily used, but he knows he’ll carry her protection with him forever -- Voldemort may again find a loophole in it one day, true, but even if he does, Harry will still have that piece of her. It’s in his skin, in his veins. Even dead, she’s doing the best she can to keep him safe.

Hagrid’s explanation is neither completely correct nor detailed, but he has the basics and that’s all Harry really needed when he was actually eleven anyway.

“It’s hard to believe I did something like that... I’m just... That’s... a lot to take in,” Harry says, because he’s not quite sure what he said when he was eleven and he doesn’t know how a person’s meant to respond to having this information revealed to him. He thinks he was probably just so thrilled to get away from the Dursleys that he accepted it without many questions.

Hagrid, he reflects as he nods and chews his lip and tries to recover his breath from meeting Quirrell in the Leaky Cauldron, is not the obvious choice to introduce Harry to the wizarding world. He’s not very organised, he doesn’t understand much about the muggle world, and he can’t actually do magic -- and his answers to Harry’s questions aren’t exactly deep.

But there’s no guile in Hagrid. He is honest and open and perfectly pleased to meet Harry and help him get his school things. Even as old as Harry is now, he can’t help but respond to that a little. Hagrid isn’t an obvious choice, but he is a _good_ choice.

He knows Hagrid well enough to know that he’s honestly delighted to be the one to show Harry Diagon Alley, and Harry tries to play along a little for his sake. He feigns wonder as they go, even when Hagrid does something as mundane as tapping his umbrella on the wall out the back of the pub. 


	13. Chapter 13

Diagon Alley is way busier now than it was the last time Harry visited. The school letters have gone out and there are crowds of brightly dressed witches and wizards and loud, sticky-fingered children racing about. The crowd of preteens outside Quality Quidditch Supplies is noisy and terrifying, and, because Harry is still very small for his age, also much taller than him.

There are old, dead things in the Alley that Harry cannot help but notice. Their eyes -- if they have eyes left, which not all of them do -- then fix on him and follow him through the throng. Harry is glad that everyone gets out of Hagrid’s way and allows them to keep up a good pace, because several of them immediately begin moving toward him. He doesn’t want to feel their cold hands.

“Gringotts,” says Hagrid cheerfully, as they approach the huge white building with the dead of battles past still circling its steps.

Harry is still tired, and there’s still plenty to distract him, so he follows placidly in Hagrid’s wake right up until he ears the goblin say, “You have his key, sir?”

And then he blinks. Because, no, Hagrid doesn’t -- _Harry_ does.

“Got it here somewhere,” Hagrid says obliviously, but -- even if he produces a key, Harry realises, it will no longer be the right one for Harry’s vault! Harry had his key changed weeks ago.

Harry scrambles even as Hagrid is digging through his pockets, muttering and fishing out a big pile of mouldering dog biscuits which he scatters thoughtlessly upon the goblin’s desk. Harry wrinkles his nose but doesn't comment - he doesn't want to draw attention to what he's doing.

In the pocket of Harry’s jacket, buried beneath the half-full package of crushed oleander and the pointy shape of Morfin’s wand, is the tiny golden key the goblins gave him. He tugs it out and then reaches up and taps it against one of the biscuits making a mess of the goblin’s neat book of figures.

“Is -- oh, there he is, well-spotted Harry,” Hagrid says, looking up at the sound and abandoning his search.

The goblin gives Harry a short, unblinking look, but he says nothing. The intelligence behind those flat inhuman eyes is very, very alien. Goblins are clever, but in Harry’s experience they’re not very interested in what wizards get up to. 

“That seems to be in order,” he says instead.

“And I’ve got a letter here from Professor Dumbledore.”

That’s right, Harry thinks, watching the next goblin over weigh up gemstones, red ones, like rubies, huge and burning with an inner fire. The Philosopher’s Stone...

It’s right here -- and thats why Quirrell is here in Diagon Alley today, too. In the confusion of meeting him again Harry forgot, but he remembers now. The break in at Gringotts is today -- soon, too. Quirrell must be a better wizard than Harry really gave him credit for, since it takes a lot of powerful magic to get into and out of Gringotts -- that, or a lot of audacity, and he thinks Quirrell’s break in is going to be somewhat less dramatic than his own.

Harry is sufficiently conflicted that he pays very little attention to the cart ride, although there are plenty of dead down here to attract his notice, howling and crying and sometimes much too broken to make any noise at all. The cart goes fast, though, and he can almost pretend that the icy chill is just the sting of the wind.

The Philosopher’s Stone _might_ help him. It’s not a sure thing, exactly, he reminds himself. It can cure disease and magical affliction and even reverse most curses -- it keeps the person using it a picture of physical health, although it will do nothing for someone who gets hit with a Killing Curse or run over by a lorry. The immortality conferred by the Elixir of Life is not quite as sure, or as complex, a thing as a horcrux -- but Harry has no interest in living forever, just... just free from the interference of the dead.

If the Elixir of Life can cure diseases and disorders, well...

Harry gives it fifty-fifty in his head, and then he wonders if that’s a good enough chance to justify stealing it from Hagrid.

He could -- and perhaps he should -- wait until it’s in the school. He knows how to get the Stone from the mirror but... but the mirror isn’t in use until after Christmas, which is... December. Virtually January. Five months. At least. And until then, Harry doesn’t even know how Dumbledore’s keeping it.

His vault is not especially incredible to Harry, except in how the doors to Gringotts vaults are rife with the echoes of the unhappy dead, so Harry can’t give Hagrid more than a forced sort of smile when he sees his piles of gold through the door. In general, while it’s good to know that he doesn’t have to worry about money, but he doesn’t get excited about it like he does about, say, Quidditch.

Unfortunately, he still has to go in if he wants to get any of it.

There are hands clawing from that door, grasping for freedom and air. He hesitates.

“Don’t like those carts much myself,” Hagrid says, peering down at him. He claps him agreeably on the shoulder and Harry stumbles from the unintentional force of it.

Hagrid, now that Harry glances at him, does look sort of weak-kneed and shaky.

Harry squeezes his eyes shut as he crosses the threshold into the vault and perhaps Hagrid doesn’t notice, but he thinks the goblin Griphook probably does. The hands all scrape at him as he goes. He feels icy cold all over, cold enough that he is sick with it to his belly, and he clenches his hands and tries not to shiver.

Hagrid gives a brief -- and not very helpful, given that he has no frame of reference for how much anything is actually worth -- explanation of the different coins. Harry nods and fills a pouch for their purchases today. He tries his best to ignore the grasping hands in the doorway, and not to think about how he’s going to have to go right back through it in a moment.

When they get back in the cart, Hagrid with some difficulty, the big man frowns down at him. “Harry,” he says slowly, “you’re cold.”

“It’s freezing down here,” says Harry.

Hagrid grunts, but whatever he might say next is lost to the stinging wind whipping past them as the cart lurches into action, and he shuts his mouth firmly.

It’s just as well. Harry doesn’t really know how to explain that one to Hagrid.

They retrieve the grubby package from vault seven hundred and thirteen, with its equally disgusting doorway.

Under Gringotts, among the stone walls and the guttering light of magically burning torches, there are a great many dead. They are noisy and grabby and as much as Harry tries to focus on the stone in its nondescript packaging, he can still feel them when they reach out to him, and still hear them when they cry.

Harry feels powerfully unwell by the time they emerge -- he suspects his body temperature has dropped too low and it’s making him sick. Hagrid seems to attribute all this to the carts, and he peers at Harry in concern when they finally emerge into the daylight of Diagon Alley.

It’s still summer and even though it’s not hot, the light is warm enough that Harry feels like it’s burning on his skin. He knows his hair is damp -- with melting ice, not sweat, although Hagrid can’t know that.

“I was gonna slip off for a pick-me-up,” Hagrid admits, “but I think it’s better if I take you with me. You look right awful, Harry. A bit of a sit-down and something to drink will do you good. We’ll get your school robes after.”

Harry nods, even though now that he’s away from the hellish underground he actually feels like he’s recovering pretty well. There are a lot of dead in Gringotts, and Harry feels like it’s only getting worse every time he goes down there. Maybe that’s because he’s been there a few times lately...?

They head back to the Leaky Cauldron and Harry finds them a quiet table in a dark corner and sits in the corner so Hagrid’s enormous bulk will shield him from the rest of the room. There are still dead things in here, but they’re calmer now because Harry is too -- and Quirrell is gone, at least.

It is best that Hagrid is between him and the rest of the room, because if Harry cannot see the dead out there, he cannot pay attention to them -- and that means they won't pay attention to him.

The table is scrubbed clean but faintly sticky like all pub tables, and there is a definite whiff of old beer and woodsmoke. It’s warm because the fire is lit even in the middle of summer so the Floo can be used.

There’s a salt shaker on the table, a small glass one with a continuously spinning little brass grinder in one end. Harry lays his exhausted eyes on it and stares for a second.

Hagrid slings his overcoat over the back of the chair. “Sit tight,” he says, and he goes to order.

Harry stares at the overcoat.

Hagrid just...

Hagrid, Harry reflects, _would_ just leave his overcoat with the Philosopher’s Stone in it slung over a chair in a grubby London pub.

He licks his lips and glances after the huge man, who doesn’t look back and doesn’t seem at all concerned by what he’s done. It _cannot_ be this easy.

Harry’s heart is suddenly racing again.

He glances around and confirms nobody is watching him in their corner here. Then he scrambles for Morfin’s wand, flicks it at the salt shaker and hisses a transforming spell. Transforming one inanimate object into another of a similar size is second year stuff, third year at best, but the broken wand fights him viciously. He tries again -- and again -- he knows this is taking too long, he’s going to be seen or caught or Hagrid will return before he’s gotten anywhere and he’ll have to explain how he got this bloody -- useless -- _piece of shit -- wand!_

_There!_

Finally, sluggishly, the shaker goes blocky and red and burnished to a bloody sheen before his eyes.

It _looks_ like the Philosopher’s Stone.

Harry hears the thump of Hagrid’s heavy step and yanks it off the table just as the big man returns. The wand goes up the sleeve of his jacket and the fake stone goes in his pocket.

But his window of opportunity is gone.

Harry looks up at Hagrid. From his face, nothing’s amiss. He sets himself upon his seat carefully but heavily, and he’s so big he blocks out a lot of the light and almost all Harry’s view of the room, which serves the dual purposes of making it impossible to see (and therefore pay any attention to) the dead things shifting about in the pub and making it impossible for any well-meaning fan to spot Harry.

Harry doesn’t inquire after what may or may not be in Hagrid’s huge cup, but he does thank him for the drink he brings Harry, which is lemonade.

“Not the exploding kind,” Hagrid assures him, setting it down in front of him.

All Harry can think of is the Stone in the pocket of Hagrid’s overcoat. Now that he’s had the taste of an opportunity to get it, it’s all he can concentrate on. He might be able to fix himself.

He stares at the condensation on his glass in silence. It drips slowly and forms a ring around the bottom of the glass on the wooden table.

He really just needs to separate Hagrid from his coat again. How hard can it be?

Harry leans forward and takes a sip of his drink and, lamely, asks Hagrid if he knew Harry’s mum as well as he knew his dad. It doesn’t take a lot of encouragement for Hagrid to start talking about Lily -- he says all the things Harry’s heard before: brightest witch of her age, sharp tongue, short temper. His description makes Harry think, briefly, of Ginny. It's been a long time since he's seen her. And the next time he sees her, she'll be eleven again. Weird.

Harry nods along and tries to look attentive, even as he thinks about his options. He’d love to be able to just hit him with a body-bind curse and use a memory charm after, but Harry isn’t convinced he could manage a curse strong enough to have any effect on a half-giant to begin with -- and even if he could, Morfin’s wand is too dodgy to chance it. It’d be nothing like transfiguring an inanimate object.

Actual magic spells are right out, basically. So can he distract him with something? Something that’ll make Hagrid leave Harry alone with his coat?

Harry rubs his nose thoughtfully even as Hagrid tells him how kind and gentle Lily was.

“She sounds wonderful,” he says, feeling deeply disingenuous, and frankly a little guilty, because he’s barely even paying attention to the commentary of one of his favourite people about the topic of his own dead mother.

He knows that if he could let Hagrid know, if he understood what Harry’s situation currently is, he’d offer the stupid Stone up in a heartbeat -- well, okay, maybe not in a heartbeat, since he’s under orders from Dumbledore to keep it safe. But he would, even if he wanted to talk to Dumbledore about it as well.

Harry listens and thinks while he sips his drink. If he thinks about it, this is just like pulling a stupid prank, and George Weasley is probably the greatest purveyor of mischief Harry knows. What would George do?

The answer comes to him almost immediately, and Harry slips one hand into his pocket and nods to a shape on the far side of the room, just visible behind Hagrid’s huge shoulder. “Do wizards, erm, do they usually dress like that?”

As Hagrid turns to look -- with no discretion whatsoever, bless him -- Harry dumps a pinch of powder from his pocket into his drink and, feeling mildly gross, swirls it with one small childish finger so it doesn’t all clump and gather on the surface.

Hagrid turns back, frowning heavily. “You mean the hat?”

“It’s got a taxidermy cat on top,” Harry points out.

These things, he knows, are in fact completely normal for wizards and witches of a certain age. Most of Harry’s generation thinks it’s a bit silly, which is all to the better, because it is a bit silly. And also _deeply weird_.

“Yeah. Some people are like that,” Hagrid says and shrugs. “Think there’s a corner in Malkin’s where you can see them if you like. Drink up,” he adds, taking a huge gulp of his drink, “we’ve got a bit left to do today.”

“Right,” Harry agrees. But he has to buy time, of course, because again: Hagrid is a half-giant and it’ll take some time to affect him, even mixed with the alcohol. “Sorry,” he says, “I’m just -- my stomach is a bit--”

“Ah, well. Shops won’t close just yet,” Hagrid says, softening immediately.

Harry gives him what he hopes is a shy smile. “Sorry,” he says again. He does mean it, and he feels the accompanying grimace cross his face. It’s one thing to drop a potion in someone's drink for a prank that’s in good fun, but it’s another to slip someone raw potions ingredients to steal from them. Maybe he should --

He thinks about swiping Hagrid’s cup and tossing it out, inventing an excuse. He’ll look like a maniac. Harry watches him drink again. He stays silent and feels vaguely like a coward. The cup thumps back onto the wood. It sounds hollow.

Well. Too late now anyway.

Harry sips his lemonade.

It only takes about five minutes for a grimace to cross Hagrid’s face. He rubs his belly with one huge hand. Over the next several minutes he flushes and sweats, and his expression contorts further.

“‘Scuse me,” he says finally, “carts might’ve disagreed with me worse than I thought,” and he lurches from his seat in search of a toilet.

“Take your time.” Harry looks away, not sure of what expression might show on his face if he doesn’t.

Hagrid thumps out of his line of sight.

Harry waits three heartbeats, glances for any onlookers -- there’s a woman praying, but her throat’s cut right through so he doesn’t think she’ll be reporting a theft to anybody -- and then he dives for Hagrid’s coat.

It takes him about a minute and a half to find the Stone, unwrap it, switch it, and rewrap it. It may just be the longest minute and a half of his life. Every second he fights the urge to glance up and look around -- the more he does, he knows, the guiltier he’ll look if somebody does see him. It’s best, he knows, to pretend to be doing something he has every right to.

Then it’s over.

Harry’s back in his seat with the Philosopher’s Stone in his pocket. And in Hagrid’s coat is a salt shaker dressed up like a mythical rock.

His hands shake, but now it’s more with excitement. He desperately wants to rush home -- or, rather, back to his dreary hotel -- and try it out. The Elixir of Life is famously easy to brew. He can have it within an hour. He wants it. He _wants_ it.

It’s like a beat within his skull, thumping in time with his pulse. Now, now, _now, now--_

Because Harry is not actually eleven, he clenches his fists and closes his eyes and tells himself sternly: wait. _Wait_.

It takes Hagrid forever to get back, which is what Harry gets for dropping something in his drink that causes nausea and painful diarrhoea in humans. He can only assume it must be having pretty much the same effect on Hagrid. He doesn’t think about that overmuch.

Instead he drinks his lemonade and tries not to think too much of the weight of the stone in his pocket. They still have a lot of shopping to do.

 


	14. Chapter 14

When Hagrid does finally return, looking flushed and not terribly happy, he scoops up his overcoat without a second thought, slings it on and pats his pocket for the weight of the Stone -- or, in this case, a salt shaker. “Right. Well. Bit of a delay, but we can get right to it now. Feeling better?”

Harry nods, and they head on down the Alley and toward Madam Malkin’s Robes For All Occasions, breaking a path through the crowd as they go.

A bell gives a tiny tinkle as they enter the shop, although of course there is nothing so mundane as a real bell above the door -- it’s a charm, although not one Harry knows how to cast.

The shop smells of leather and fabric and, faintly, dust. Light slants in through the windows and hits a display of fabric that burns and shimmers in its rays. Harry doesn’t think even Dumbledore would take a chance on wearing that stuff.

Malkin is as short and dumpy as ever, although she looks young to Harry. He never even noticed her going grey, but now that he looks at her there’s a lot more dark brown in her hair than he remembers from the last time he saw her. She is dressed, as always, in her own stock -- today she is dressed from head to toe in mauve.

“Ah, another one for Hogwarts? I’ll be with you in a minute, love,” she calls, because she is dealing with her current customers and --

Harry notices Narcissa first, and that’s probably lucky. It gives him the opportunity to brace himself. The last time he saw her face is more than ten years past, and the worst thing she’s ever personally done to Harry is to make vague and ugly comments about Sirius’s death. And -- well. When he sees her, something hard in him softens, because he remembers her asking if Draco still lived, and he remembers her turning and lying right to Voldemort’s face.

Next to her is Lucius, and whatever halfhearted respect Narcissa evokes in Harry dies a cold death as soon as he lays eyes on him. Lucius Malfoy looks less like Draco than Harry remembers -- he has broader shoulders, a stronger jaw. He doesn’t look mean, standing there with his wife and settling his account with Malkin. Appearances are funny like that.

Harry tears his eyes away and tries to extinguish the scowl on his face. He pulls his mouth into a relaxed shape. He intentionally smooths the lay of his eyebrows. His eyes drop to Draco, who is standing near the ancient register, stiff and impatient and already bored again right between his parents.

Between them, Draco is... small.

Harry doesn’t like Draco. He’s a spineless, arrogant, nasty piece of work. As an adult, he doesn’t even have the presence of his father. What he _has_ is a trust fund, a trophy wife and a chip on his shoulder.

“Not to worry! Take your time,” rumbles Hagrid cheerfully.

Harry blinks. He snaps his eyes from the figures of the Malfoys and back to Madam Malkin, who is shrinking the family’s purchases. The three of them barely seem to register his presence -- Draco, certainly, doesn’t even look at him -- until Lucius turns to sneer at Hagrid.

His eyes drift past Harry, pause, and return. Harry can feel the second his eyes touch on the scar.

“Ah,” he says softly, which makes Narcissa look too. Her mouth does something odd and unpleasant when she looks at him.

“Oh, my,” she mouths.

“Hagrid,” murmurs Lucius Malfoy, and now his eyes finally settle on Hagrid properly.

“Malfoy,” says Hagrid, and there is absolutely no misinterpreting how little this meeting pleases either one of them.

“It must be a busy time of year at Hogwarts.” Although he‘s still talking to Hagrid, he is looking at Harry. “ -- especially if they’re sending _you_ to collect the students.”

Harry feels the way Hagrid is looming, suddenly, like a big shadow has passed over them all. He seems bristling and tense in a way Harry is not, actually, very familiar with.

“That’d be Hogwarts business,” says Hagrid, in a tone of great finality. Harry remembers all of a sudden just how many stunning spells it takes to put a half-giant down. From the narrowing of Lucius’s eyes, he’s thinking of something similar.

“Indeed,” says Malfoy, accepting a receipt from Malkin, who looks like she could not possibly wish them all farther from her shop than she does right this second. “The headmaster certainly does have a -- highly individual way of running things.”

Hagrid can’t really get any bristlier or less friendly looking, but he does pull himself up to his full height, which is extremely considerable, and the way he glowers down at Malfoy is -- well, Narcissa takes Draco’s hand and picks her way around them, preceding her husband at a surprisingly fast clip, and Harry thinks she’s probably taking the wisest course.

“Who _is_ he?” Draco says loudly, even as Narcissa draws him through the door. His attention is mostly fixed on Hagrid, but he looks at Harry’s face for a second as they pass. His grey gaze, already cold and sharp, flick up to Harry’s eyes and his mouth tightens. Harry has no idea if he's been recognised or not. 

“We’ve got business here,” says Hagrid in a growl. “So if that’s all--”

“Believe me, I take no pleasure in lingering,” drawls Lucius.

“ _Mother_ ,” Draco says, two steps away, then three, and then his complaints are muffled by the closing of the door behind them.

His father follows them, although he pauses on his way out.

“I do hope, Hagrid,” says Lucius in his slow, disdainful way, like he doesn’t think he ought to have to say it but he clearly can’t trust Hagrid to have the intelligence of the average niffler so he’s going to point it out anyway, “that you don’t intend to allow him to continue to wander about in broken spectacles and muggle rags like some... urchin.”

The door closes behind him with a clatter. The bell doesn’t sound.

Harry glances down at his clothes, wondering for a second if he put on Dudley’s cast offs by mistake this morning and Hagrid'sjust too kind or too oblivious to comment. But no, Harry is wearing the same clothing he got secondhand, and maybe jeans and slightly scuffed trainers aren’t appropriate for all occasions, but they’re fine for a trip to Diagon bloody Alley. They're just very muggle.

As usual, Malfoy is a piece of work. Harry’s just more used to it being _Draco_ Malfoy by now.

“Malfoy,” mutters Hagrid, ostensibly to Harry but really, Harry thinks, to himself. “Whole family’s a bad lot.”

“Erm,” says Harry. He isn’t entirely sure what to say. He knows that this is completely normal Lucius Malfoy behaviour -- and he’s certainly seen him behave worse, of course. But he’s also pretty sure that most people would be surprised to encounter someone who treats other people the way Lucius does. “Is he...”

He doesn’t know how to finish that sentence anyway, so he lets it trail off into nothing.

“He’s a -- well. He and his family were big supporters of You-Know-Who for a while there. Came back right after he was gone, of course, said he’d been bewitched. Codswallop, I say,” he adds, scowling heartily at the thought. “A man like that, Harry, doesn’t need to be bewitched to go bad.”

Harry agrees with him, as it happens, but he’s not sure he ought to say so. He is quiet instead.

“Well,” says Malkin brightly, into the unhappy silence that ensues, “let’s get you fitted, Mr Potter. Hagrid,” she adds sharply, “aren’t you about due for another suit?”

“Erm,” says Hagrid, suddenly looking much less threatening. “Not much time today, sorry,” he says awkwardly.

She gives him a disapproving look but lets that go. “Up on the stool here, dear, that’s right,” she chivvies Harry along instead. “Now, it’s your job to stay very still for me, all right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” There’s a man hanging from his neck in one corner of the room, Harry notices finally, but then he turns deliberately away. The dead man hasn’t bothered Harry yet. Harry can just ignore him.

He’s always entertained by the precision and swiftness of Malkin’s equipment anyway. Whatever charm she uses to get her measuring tape and needles and scissors to do their work is one she is extremely practised at, and it’s a bit like watching a live show with the way all her tools dart around him and flash under the light.

All Harry has to do for the next few minutes is stay still, watch, and not think of the dead. It’s practically the easiest part of his day.

“Good work,” Malkin tells him kindly when she finally lets him down. “You were so still I thought I was dressing a little mannequin!”

Harry is reminded that he looks eleven, and that some people treat all children as though they’re about six.

“Well,” he says, feeling supremely awkward, “you did say to be still.” He directs an uncertain smile at her.

She smiles back obliviously.

They pay for Harry’s purchases.

After the Leaky Cauldron and Madam Malkin’s, the rest of the trip to Diagon Alley feels less eventful. Harry sees faces he knows here and there. Once he sees a tiny looking Pansy Parkinson, still with the milkfat clinging to the sharp bones of her face, and another time he notices the shape of a taxidermy vulture towering above the throng and knows Neville must also be nearby somewhere.

The dead are no greater or lesser in number than he remembers from previous visits, and like usual they don’t seem all that active or animated until Harry is nearby -- the crowd of students and adult guardians seems to have no great impact upon them otherwise. For the dead, it’s just Harry -- they exist for him alone and they respond to him alone.

Harry isn’t sure how his meeting with Ollivander will go, but it never really deviates from what he remembers -- the wandmaker is old, and although he’d seemed curiously omniscient to Harry as a child, he now seems deeply absorbed in the specifics of his own experience. Harry exists for him only in the context of his history and his professional interests -- the wands of his parents, the wand of Voldemort, the wand that works best for Harry.

He fingers Harry’s scar, leaning too close. Harry tries not to twitch away from his bony old fingers. "I'm sorry to say I sold the wand that did it,” Ollivander tells him, unblinking, watching Harry’s scar with his pale and watery eyes.

Harry watches him right back. He is safe behind the fame and notoriety of the scar, after all. Privately he wonders if that is true. He doubts it, actually. Ollivander sold a wand to Tom Riddle and it went out into the world to do great things.

He says as much to Harry even as he rings up the purchase.

“Terrible things, yes,” he breathes to Harry as he hands him his wand. “But great.”

Harry wonders if Ollivander -- his Ollivander, from the future he left behind -- still feels that way after being held in the Malfoys' dungeons for more than a year. 

He can't help his frown, but he takes the wand and doesn’t rise to this comment. It's too complicated. “Thanks,” he says evenly, and then Hagrid’s heavy hand falls upon his shoulder and he steers Harry clear of the sop.

“Bit of an odd fellow, Ollivander,” he admits. “Still, best man in the world for wands!”

Harry isn’t sure that’s true -- mostly because he doubts Hagrid’s sources for he information, and because he’s met plenty of international witches and wizards who seem to have no trouble with their wands. But he nods along anyway.

Other than for a few moments during the nerve wracking adventure to Ollivander’s, Harry’s attention remains torn between what is actually going on around him, the shades of the dead that cross his path, and the Stone burning a hole in Harry’s pocket.

The Philosopher’s Stone doesn’t feel particularly magical -- it doesn’t have an aura of power or send a tingle through Harry’s senses. It is, as it sits inert against his hip, just a rock. Despite that, Harry cannot tear his attention from it and it seems improbably weighty in his pocket.

Harry sees Hedwig at the pet shop and he hesitates over her. It's taken him years to stop missing her and he wonders if it’s okay to get that attached all over again, but he misses -- he misses his friends, and he misses the familiarity of his own reality, and he’s not sure he could rightly bear to live with a different owl, not when everything else has so dramatically changed around him.

“She’s a beauty,” Hagrid tells him encouragingly, following Harry's stare and leaning in to get a better look at her.

“She is,” Harry agrees quietly. She’s just a bird, he reminds himself. He can get attached to a bird. Surely. “Can I get her?”

“Dead clever, that one,” the shop owner says when they go to purchase her. “You want to watch her beak, though -- she’s not patient.”

That, Harry remembers vividly. He resigns himself to bitten fingers and occasional rude awakenings. It will be worth it to have her as his friend again.

They go through the crowd at the Leaky Cauldron all over again and Harry makes a point of carefully avoiding the notice of any of the dead milling in the pub, although he can see that they are still unusually animated. When they step blinking out into the light of muggle London, it’s like returning to a different world, a world of coats with shoulder pads and old coin operated parking metres. There are plenty of dead with cold hands and mangled bodies, but no pointed hats.

Hagrid sees Harry onto the right bus. Since navigating the public transport system is by no means something Hagrid is good at, the right bus is as designated by Harry, who is of course not returning to Privet Drive if he can possibly help it.

“Gotta make sure you look for Platform Nine and Three Quarters,” Hagrid tells him, tucking the ticket into Harry’s hand. The bus driver seems to take a dim view of Hedwig but caged pets are allowed -- Harry’s seen plenty of cat carriers on public transport of all kinds. And Hedwig is the very model of good behaviour, staring unblinkingly out of her cage at the driver with her huge eyes.

“Right,” says Harry, and, as much as he loves Hagrid, he is glad not to be relying on him for actually useful instructions in this regard. “Yes. And I’ll-- I’ll see you at school.”

“That you will,” Hagrid says brightly, beaming.

Harry gets his ticket, and by the time he thinks to glance out the bus’s window again, Hagrid is gone.


	15. Chapter 15

Alone on the bus, Harry ignores the dead in a haze of anticipation and anxiety. Now that Hagrid is gone, the shopping is done and someone else is steering the bus, he has nothing to distract himself from the Stone, which attracts his attention like a veela’s dance. He shoves his hand into his pocket and wraps his cold fingers around it, which soothes him for a second. It’s hard, it’s room temperature, it’s small. The Stone is very ordinary in his hand.

The bus hums around him at intersections and Hedwig shifts restlessly when the traffic jolts them back into their seats. She shuffles her feathers unhappily. Harry is reminded that this is probably the first time she’s travelled by muggle means.

“Sorry,” he tells her, very quietly, although anybody who notices him will at least know he’s talking to a pet. It’s not the same as talking to something that they can’t even see. Talking to pets is normal.

That thought engenders the sudden realisation that Hedwig is real, too. He hasn’t seen the shade of an animal as yet, not even a magical one, so he knows Hedwig, as he sees her, is always truly a part of the same reality that other people also perceive. It is a small thing, but it seems vitally important.

He smiles at her, and then he rubs the Stone in his pocket.

His attention is drawn inexorably back to it. It’s right here, in his possession. It could fix him. Only an extraordinary power of will keeps Harry from getting out and apparating back to his hotel room immediately.

It seems like a good idea on the surface, but Harry cannot recall how or when the Trace is applied -- and apparating with Morfin’s wand seems likely to land three quarters of him in bloody Hungary, or something equally dire. No, Harry knows that it’s best to sit tight and wait for the bus to take him out to his destination, he’s just --

Is this how Voldemort felt, Harry wonders morbidly, prompted by the memory of Quirrell in the Leaky Cauldron, when he saw the Philosopher’s Stone in the Mirror of Erised but could not get it out?

It’s right there. It’s in his pocket. The Elixir of Life is famously easy to brew once a person has the Stone. Even Harry can’t screw it up. Which means that Harry is at most a few hours away from finding out if it can really cure him.

The bus turns a corner a little too sharply and Hedwig gives an unsettled hoot.

“It’s okay,” Harry tells her quietly, “we’ll be back soon.” He’ll let her out then, he thinks. The big brass cage is fine for travelling but to keep her in something so small would be cruel. Hedwig needs to be able to stretch her wings... and decimate the local rodent population, of course.

It seems to take the bus forever to take them out of the city proper and get them all the way out on the winding roads that finally lead them back to the hotel. Even though Harry chose it to get as far away as possible from the huge concentrations of the dead in London, he can’t help but resent the distance. He knows it isn’t really that far, and it doesn’t actually take that long, but every stop seems to grate on him, as though it exists specifically to delay the moment Harry gets back.

When he does finally pull the cord to indicate that he wants the next stop, he is antsy and clumsy about collecting his things. The bus takes sixteen years to slow down and the doors are a century in sighing slowly open. But then they are open, and he breathes the warm, petrol-scented summer air and hurls himself through the doors and onto the footpath.

“Thanks,” he calls over his shoulder to the driver, waving one arm, but he doesn’t look back.

Harry sidesteps the echo of the dead man in the carpark, and where he was disturbing just that morning he seems barely noticeable now. He ignores the echo of the sobbing woman. His own room is dead people-free and just as he left it -- housekeeping has not been by. Harry prefers it that way, since he still hasn’t gotten the purple stains off the walls. He’ll work on that -- _later_.

For now, Harry throws open the window and unlocks the door to Hedwig’s cage. She makes a questioning hoot but he leaves her to it. If she wants to go out she will.

He still isn’t sure where he vanished his cauldron earlier, so there’s no hope of getting that one back, but he did get another while he was out with Hagrid anyway -- Harry could hardly say he had one already, after all. He fills it with plain tap water, conjures a tiny bluebell coloured flame in the cramped hotel bathroom and drops the gleaming red Philosopher’s Stone right in.

Then he waits.

The adage that a watched pot never boils proves frightfully untrue. Even though Harry can’t drag his gaze from the cauldron for more than about ten seconds at a time, it still does boil eventually.

At first the heat makes the Stone bleed a diluted pinkish colour into the water, which causes some anxiety -- that is definitely not the colour the the Elixir of Life is supposed to turn. There exists a lot of literature on the topic of the Stone and its Elixir, both fictional and factual, and each description is very specific.

But then it takes on an orangeish cast, and then it yellows, and then it finally turns a bright, burnished gold. It is thick and shimmering and smells like something sweet -- sweet without being cloying, just heady and promising and -- _ripe_.

Harry rinses out one of the cheap hotel mugs, dips it in and scoops out a serve. He throws caution completely to the wind and downs it all immediately, without even hesitating, even though he knows better.

It’s like drinking sunshine. It infuses him and burns from his bones out and for a brief, glowing second he wants to scream and cry in pure exultation. He forces his eyes open and sees the golden light of them reflecting from the near walls in a soft glow.

It’s over before he even has a moment to worry that the glowing might be, you know, permanent. The golden light and the burning warmth abandon him, and the sunshine feeling disappears a second after. He misses it a little -- Harry has been cold for so long, and he feels like this warmth is, in some strange way, the opposite of the feeling of the death magic that he’s been steeped in for so long.

Harry feels... he feels good. He feels like he’s slept, like the little aches and discomforts that come with being a living and organic thing have vanished in that one single, shining moment -- even those he never noticed are just gone.

He pulls his glasses off because his eyes are working properly, he is seeing clearly -- Harry’s eyes have never been good, not like this, and he tucks one arm of his glasses into the collar of his shirt and leaves them hanging there. He can _see_. He has _peripheral vision_ , for the first time he can even remember. Has peripheral vision always been this good? He's been missing out. 

He blinks around, abruptly aware tat he’s never had a really precise prescription in his life. He wishes all of the sudden that Hermione’s parents could be optometrists instead of dentists, so she might nag him about getting his eyes checked instead of his teeth -- there’s never been anything the matter with Harry’s teeth.

There’s not the slightest doubt in Harry’s mind that the Elixir has worked exactly as it is supposed to. All that remains is to see if it has had any effect on his ability to see the unhappy and lingering dead.

He almost wants to prolong this moment of uncertainty: he cannot be sure, but he also cannot be disappointed. His excitement wars with his nervousness in his belly and he licks his lips. The feeling cannot last, though, and Harry is not a coward.

He comes out from the bathroom, goes to the door and steps outside deliberately, feeling the uncertainty knot up in his guts.

Disappointment is crushing.

The dead man in the car park is still right there, and he seems even clearer to Harry’s newly corrected vision. A second later, the burning rush of disappointment is joined by a new swooping dread -- because Harry can see _more_ than one dead person out here now.

The new shade is of a young woman, with a long skirt and wooden-soled shoes. Her dress is covered by a long white apron and her hair by a pale cloth, and beneath that her face is a mask of red. There’s no way she can see, Harry thinks, past the ruin of her face. She wanders and clutches it.

Harry swallows thickly. At this point he feels like he’s seen more violently killed people than a veteran auror, but that doesn’t mean he enjoys it. Or even that he’s used to it, if he’s honest.

“Sir, excuse me,” says the new ghost, and he pauses, wondering if he’s wrong and she really can see him after all. But then she adds: “Miss! Miss, excuse me,” and Harry remembers that he’s eleven and nobody calls him ‘sir’ anyway -- not even century old ghosts.

The dead man out there doesn’t seem to hear her.

Harry walks back into his hotel room and shuts the door on both of them.

Is it possible that the Elixir of Life was a bad idea, contrary to every possible expectation? Or is this just the natural progression of Harry’s curse? He knows that the sounds of other nearby dead things have been getting louder and more obvious over time, but he wonders also if somehow the Elixir of Life has, perhaps, strengthened his sensitivity to death along with his weak eyes.

Either way, the potion is not the solution Harry so dearly wanted it to be, and that disappointment burns in him terribly.

He flops down upon the bed and throws one arm over his eyes to block out most of the ambient light. It feels weird without his glasses pressing against his nose. And... yep. Harry can hear the sobbing again. Still. It’s not any louder, though, which h supposes he ought to view as a blessing.

He hadn’t realised that he’d pinned so much on the Philosopher’s Stone and its Elixir of Life, but it’s such a crushing disappointment that he feels overwhelmed and adrift in it. Although Harry isn’t usually prone to fits of depressive apathy, there are inescapable and repetitive thoughts that won’t stop intruding upon him. He can't escape this lengthy, internal diatribe on the futility and hopelessness of his situation.

 _Hermione would have this figured out by now_ , he thinks unhappily.

He stays there for hours, until the sky turns properly dark despite the long summer day, fixed upon all the things he hasn’t managed to accomplish, and then upon how ridiculous it is that he’s feeling like this right now. Harry _would_ find a way to be the only bloody person on the planet who could be blackly disappointed in the Elixir of Life.

He isn’t sleeping and he isn’t getting anywhere by sprawling in a morose heap, so even though he’d dearly like to stay there, Harry finds the energy to get up -- and also the energy to be mildly embarrassed that he’s spent the past several hours laying around and sulking.

He bottles up the remaining Elixir on auto-drive, although he has no idea why he doesn’t just toss it. He tries to think about his course of action instead.

If he’s so sure Hermione would have solved all these problems by now, he thinks a little vindictively toward himself, maybe he should try tackling this problem the way she would.

So: what would Hermione do?

Hermione, Harry decides, would go to the library.

In fact, he realises, scowling, she has already gone to the library about this specific problem -- and her search was so futile that she decided time travel would ultimately be easier.

So that’s... great.

Harry sighs and rubs his face without his hands. Once again, it’s weird without his glasses. He pats the front of his shirt to make sure they’re still tucked into his collar.

For a wild moment he considers following in Hermione’s footsteps directly and sending himself even further back. Sure, Morfin is dead now _,_ but what about back when Harry was six?

He comes to his senses pretty quickly. Even aside from the extremely dangerous time travel spell that previously required all three of them to cast in the first place, going back to an even younger age represents so many logistical challenges that it’s basically a nightmare.

Maybe there are other solutions. Hermione never looked into substitutes _other_ than blood in Gawaine’s potion, and Harry isn’t quite sure why. Maybe that’s something she knew about brewing that he doesn’t -- not a short list -- or maybe it hadn’t occurred to her, or maybe..

Harry tugs at his hair thoughtfully. He wishes he could just ask Hermione but he can’t, so...

So he’s going to have to find out himself.

Harry groans aloud. He _hates_ research.

 


	16. Chapter 16

 

Harry tries Gawaine’s potion again in a few different formulations, but it works about as well as he expects it to on each occasion -- which is to say that it doesn’t work at all. Mixing in the Elixir as a base makes it both perfectly harmless and perfectly useless every time. It’s so regular and predictable that Harry begins to suspect that the two neutralise each other in some way.

So it’s a complete failure, but at least he’s staying hydrated.

He doesn’t really expect to get anywhere with it, though, and he doesn’t. It is disheartening, but it isn’t like the crushing despair he felt over the Elixir. That’s an object lesson, Harry supposes, in letting himself get his hopes up too high. 

You’d think he’d know this by his age. 

The other thing Harry knows he needs to figure out before he goes to school is what he’ll do with the Philosopher’s Stone. He isn’t sure if Dumbledore will recognise that what Hagrid brought him is a fake. There’s no particular way to tell, short of trying to brew with it, as far as Harry can knows. It’s possible that Dumbledore might notice that there’s magic in the object he  _has_ been given, though -- the magic of an object transfigured -- which would reveal it to be a fake pretty quickly. 

He thinks about it for maybe an hour. 

There’s no way to predict what will happen, and trying to plan for every contingency that’s possible gives him a headache, so he doesn’t try. 

Besides, even if nobody notices that it’s not the real Stone, Harry is pretty sure he  _should_ give it back -- to Flamel, if not to Dumbledore -- just as a matter of, you know, basic morality. The principle of property ownership is, as the Hermione voice in the back of his mind reminds him, _important to the functioning of society._  

Also, and more importantly, Harry feels weird about stealing it. It doesn’t belong to him, after all, and it’s not -- this isn’t like stealing a horcrux or nicking a bezoar in an emergency or anything like that.

So then he wonders if returning it would be a safe thing for him to do. Pretty much all methods of contact can be tracked by magic, if someone is really determined to track them -- and in this case, he thinks they would be. Harry does not want to end up explaining to anybody why he has the Philosopher’s Stone. 

Outsmarting Flamel, a genius alchemist hundreds of years his senior, as well as, well,  _Dumbledore_ , who could possibly also take a strong interest in the matter... 

It doesn’t seem very likely. 

Harry isn’t stupid, exactly, but he’s not Dumbledore. And part of not being stupid is knowing his limitations. 

Harry puts the idea of returning the Stone to either of them on the back burner. But he doesn’t like thinking about it, either, so he shoves the Stone itself into a rolled up pair of socks in the bottom of his backpack and refuses to spend any more time or energy contemplating that.

There are other things he needs to focus on.

Like going to Hogwarts again.  _As a first year._

It’s going to be really strange meeting everyone again -- Ron and Hermione most of all, obviously, because he knows them best as adults. But everyone else, too, including even the teachers. 

Having met Hagrid is something of a wake-up call. If he wants to keep his time travelling to himself, he needs to learn to pretend he doesn’t know about a lot of things. Harry’s not a great actor, but learning how to lie has been kind of a necessary skill over the course of his life -- which, just between Harry and the spectres of the dead, is saying something about his life thus far.

Not for the first time, he wonders if he’s doing the right thing, keeping all this a secret. If he just tells Dumbledore what’s happening, he might fix a lot of his own problems. He’ll probably cause a whole bunch of new ones, but they might be easier ones.

He’ll have to come clean about stealing the Philosopher’s Stone -- but if he knows Dumbledore, the old man won’t even bat an eyelash as long as he gets it back. That’s hardly a deterrent. 

He will have to explain his rationale for travelling through time, which is of course a terribly illegal, very dangerous thing. He suspects Dumbledore will be cheerfully curious about that matter, as he so often is about dangerous but ultimately well-intentioned criminal offences. 

He will also have to explain the course of the second war with Voldemort, or submit himself to legilimency, or both. He’s less sanguine about that. 

Dumbledore is a great man. He is kind, wise and clever, but he is also very driven, and Harry... isn’t completely sure what he’ll do with Harry’s knowledge of the horcruxes and his own necessary death, or with the certainty that Harry must die to permanently defeat Voldemort. Dumbledore doesn’t always let other people in on his plans, either, which... well, Harry’s had enough ugly surprises to feel wary of that.

Aside from all of that -- and it’s _quite a lot_ , if Harry’s honest -- he’ll also have to find some way to tell Dumbledore that  _he_ , Harry, united the Deathly Hallows and mastered them -- and that not only did Harry achieve Dumbledore’s life dream before he was even eighteen, but that actually uniting the Hallows is possibly _the worst_ disaster Harry’s ever faced in his long, long life of _colossal disasters._

That’s... yeah, that’s a conversation he’d do a lot to avoid. 

If Harry can’t tell Dumbledore, he’s pretty sure he can’t tell anyone. If nothing else, few people are likely to be as blase as Dumbledore about Harry’s many recent criminal transgressions.

He rubs his hands across his face. He really can’t afford to go around telling people about the time travel thing, so he’s going to have to be eleven for at least another year. (And then twelve. And then thirteen. He feels ancient just thinking about it.)

Harry thinks he’s probably lucky that his first such encounter was with Hagrid and not with someone a little more observant. If, say, McGonagall had been the person to meet him and take him down Diagon Alley, it might have been a catastrophe -- to say nothing of if it had been Dumbledore himself. 

At Hogwarts he’ll be in the muddle with hundreds of other teenagers, at least, and it’ll be harder to tell if he’s behaving strangely. As an adult? Well, Harry can confirm that all children behave pretty strangely to adults. Children are weird. 

This is another set of problems that he tries not to think about too hard. Sometimes (often) the best course is to act without dithering too much. Instead, Harry focuses on how he can see the clock without turning his head to face it front-on. He can just move his eyes, and the glowing figures are still as clear as anything.

He puts his glasses away carefully, in a case he picks up for two quid in the service station. He doesn’t know how long the effects of the Elixir of Life will last, but he’s going to enjoy it while he can. Seeing clearly is excellent, and he can’t wait to go out and just look at things, even if he does have to dodge the dead to do it.

The next time he really gets out is when he heads for Hogwarts, and unfortunately that proves to be a holy ordeal. Making it to the platform requires Harry to travel through London.

The dead of London seem to have multiplied in Harry’s brief absence. 

Before now, the oldest shade he had seen was from sometime around the mid nineteenth century. Now... now, he’s seeing centuries and centuries of them. He can see people with rapiers at their sides. He can see divided skirts cast wide by enormous farthingales and doublets with hose under trailing overgowns. 

There is a woman with sores on her face and a starched blue rough who bleeds and bleeds through her dress, a man with a blackened face and bulging eyes and an elaborate fur cloak. 

At one point Harry turns his head toward a cry and he swears he can see an honest-to-god wimple, like something out of a portrait in the astronomy tower.

He thought London was bad before -- before, when he lived at Grimmauld Place with the lingering traces of the Black’s poor life choices, but London now is... much, much worse. He struggles through a throng of grizzly dead, aching with cold, and feels as though there’s nothing real in the whole world anymore. 

The dead are mashed together so that they fill the streets like a parade. 

King’s Cross is awful. Train lines, as Harry knows  _way too well_  by now, mean suicides. The London train system isn’t that old in the scheme of things, but King’s Cross itself has been a railway station since the 1850s. 

That’s a lot of dead people.

They... _mill_.

They’re helpless echoes and they mill in their huge, icy, muted crowd of grey and black. As soon as he goes anywhere near them their dead eyes turn on him with laser focus, and they seem to see clearly into the living world for the first time in -- centuries, for some of them.

He gets nearly halfway to the platform, and then he is so cold and disoriented that he can barely tell where he is in the station anyway. He is surrounded by reaching, icy-fingered dead people, and he does his best to focus on none of them -- stares, desperately, at the information signs around instead of at their wounds and their eyes and their soft, slack lips in their pale faces.

There is a sense that a person develops over time, though, just by living in society, and it tells a body to get out of the way of other people. 

Harry’s senses are not very good at telling the difference between the dead and the living. The third time he steps out of the way of one dead person and right into the grasping body of another, and his world goes black and icy and his veins seize up and his lungs freeze, he ducks right back out of the train station and leans against one solid brick wall, listening to the whir of the mechanical doors opening and closing.

It takes him a few minutes to recover, and in that time he puzzles it out and realises that he’d be fine if Hagrid was with him. If he had someone to follow, so he could focus on them and ignore the crowd of milling dead. 

Three of them have followed him out, and now stare at him from about two feet away. Harry ignores them. It’s not easy, but it seems like he’s getting practice in all the time.

In the end, he heads inside, grimly determined to get to the train. A wall of spectres turns to him, all eyes and reaching hands. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea to let them grab him very often -- he’s pretty sure that black nothingness that rushes into him when he pays too much attention and they grab hold of him isn’t very good for him. 

Harry opens Hedwig’s cage and says, “Show me to the platform -- platform 9 3/4.” 

She sticks her leg out in confusion, waiting for the letter she presumes him to have, which needs to get to the platform. 

Hedwig hasn’t completely adjusted to him, and they don’t always understand each other perfectly yet. 

“Show me,” he says, and holds out his hand. She shudders and flinches away from the chill of Harry’s fingers, but in the end she takes his help and glides up, up -- and  _through_ the crowd of the dead, as he knew she could. 

Harry fixes his eyes on her form and follows it more or less blindly, without even looking at the bodies that press around his peripheral. He’s sure he goes right through several shades like this because the cold burns him and makes him tremble, but he doesn’t see them, certainly pays them no attention, so they aren’t quite so real.

It’s a lot like moving through molasses, if that molasses should happen to be so cold it hurt his skin.

Hedwig diverts around obstacles, and that includes people -- the real ones, which she can see. She glides from spot to spot, turning her big yellow eyes back on him at each stop on a railing or a sign. Harry’s path is very meandering but this unorthodox tactic lets him focus on something other than the dead and helps him avoid pedestrians, so he figures he is on to a winner. 

It attracts muggle attention. The sight of a pale snowy owl gliding silently through the station in the middle of the day draws eyes, and several muggles stop to peer at her. They jostle each other and point, and somebody pulls out a bulky camera -- they are not, Harry is relieved to remember,  _quite_ in the era of camera phones as yet -- to try to snap a picture. Hedwig, clever girl, moves off every time they get lined up for a shot. 

It’s okay, Harry reassures himself. It’s hardly the first time muggles have seen owls out in daylight -- and, besides, owls are one of the very few magical creatures muggles know exist, although of course they think they’re quite mundane. It’s not like he’s loosed a phoenix in the station. She’s just a bird.

He sort of hopes he’ll run into the Weasleys before the barrier, because they are definitely alive and he could let their noise and comforting, living warmth distract him. He expects, however, that they’ll be running late. He can’t remember the specifics of the occasion when he first caught the Hogwarts Express, but the Weasley family is in a perpetual state of scrambling just to avoid being fifteen minutes late to everything. They arrive within about five minutes of the train’s departure every year, and scurry aboard at the last second, so Harry’s pretty sure they’ll be rushing to get to the train platform on time today, too. 

Hedwig circles the barrier once, twice, and then glides down to Harry as he approaches it. He closes his eyes and bulls his way through whatever stands between him and it. He hears someone swear as he goes through but he can’t be sure if he’s barelled past a muggle or if it’s just more of the dead. 

He emerges onto platform 9 3/4 and opens his eyes. It seems positively deserted by comparison. 

Hedwig gives a tiny, unsettled hoot and he turns to her as soon as he’s gotten his cart out of the way of the entrance from the barrier. 

“Thanks,” he says, running a finger along her beak where she likes it. His hand is still very cold, and she gives him an unreadable look and pulls her beak away unhappily. Well, so much for that. Instead, he opens her cage for her again, and she waddles in, as dignified as an owl can possibly be on foot. 

“You’re a good girl, Hedwig,” he tries instead. Bird expressions aren’t that easy to read, but he reminds himself to give her a treat once he gets her to Hogwarts. She might not know what it’s for by then... but his feelings will be assuaged. 


	17. Chapter 17

Harry makes it on to the Hogwarts Express without anyone recognising him, and in a low-population wizarding area like this one there aren’t enough dead to be that obstructive. He sees a man in a frilly-cuffed set of formal robes down the other and of the platform, and there is a woman sprawled across the floor only a few metres away. She is wearing what appears to be an entire fox. A child in distinctly muggle runners treads through her ribcage, but she looks perfectly solid to Harry.  
  
The train is at least easy, since Harry is required to do absolutely nothing but sit there and keep breathing until they reach Hogsmeade station. There are whispers of dead things, but the train itself is only host to a couple that Harry can see -- and he picks a  compartment as far from all of them as possible. He is not sure if this is the compartment he shared with Ron on his first journey, and he wonders if that will change whether or not he meets him here. It doesn’t really matter - he’ll be sure to meet him again eventually. He’ll be sure to meet a lot of people again eventually.  
  
He feels, absurdly, a little bit guilty that he might not be able to save Ron from his mum's corned beef sandwiches this time. He'll have to make it up to him, he thinks wearily, leaning his head against the glass of the window. This train's engine doesn't rumble through him from the point of contact while it idles. That's magic for you.  
  
The compartment remains empty as the rain idles at the platform, and Harry listens to the _clump clomp_ of footsteps in the corridor outside and watches the platform through the window. Once again, he briefly spots Mrs Longbottom’s vulture-topped hat bobbing up from the crowd and knows Neville is nearby. That thing is like a beacon.  
  
Harry’s eye lands on a trickle of redheads coming through the barrier -- Fred and George, Percy, Ron, and finally Ginny and Mrs Weasley together. Mrs Weasley looks startlingly younger, and all of her children seem strangely small and clumsy, even Percy, who has the look of a teenager who has shot right up like a weed and isn't quite used to navigating with all of his limbs yet. Harry watches them wonderingly for a long moment.  
  
His gaze lingers on Fred until he gets into the train and moves out of Harry's line of sight.  
  
“It's not exactly _empty,_ ” says a girl’s voice by the door of his compartment. For a second Harry is sure he’s hearing the dead -- but then the door slides open all the way.  
  
“It’s only one boy,” is the haughty response. “And if he doesn’t like it, he can move.” It is Malfoy -- the young version Harry remembers from Madam Malkin’s. It is strange to see him like this: short, hair slicked back, small and bossy. He has the sneer down perfectly already. “Can’t you?”  
  
Harry blinks and realises he’s being addressed -- and that Malfoy is as much of a prat as he remembers.  
  
He does not want to share a train compartment with -- he looks -- Malfoy, Crabbe, Goyle and -- is that Greengrass? She looks unexpectedly tiny. But the other compartments are closer to the dead, for one, and Harry is...  
  
Harry is not going to start a fight about train compartments with an eleven year old. He is pretty sure he’s too old for that, at least, so he just shakes his head in response to Malfoy. “You’re fine,” he says laconically.  
  
Draco Malfoy’s eyes narrow in on him. “I saw you at the tailor’s, didn’t I? You were with that -- that _Hagrid_." He has a way of saying 'Hagrid' that makes Harry twitch with the urge to hex him -- or maybe to punch him in the face. "Only," Malfoy adds, tilting his head, "You’ve gotten rid of those horrid spectacles.”  
  
“What?” Harry says. For a second, he's too startled to be annoyed. "They’re not that bad.”  
  
There’s a lot in the comment Malfoy just made, he thinks dubiously, but he is startled by that most of all. His glasses are... necessary to see? And Harry doesn’t think about them much beyond that -- they’re on his face, so it’s not like he can see them. And if he takes them off... he _also_ can’t see them, because he needs them to see.  
  
They’re in a case in his trunk right now, though.  
  
Harry rubs the bridge of his nose, where they usually sit, self-consciously. Having improved eye sight is the only really profound effect Harry has noticed from the Elixir -- aside from the possible intensification of his death senses -- but he does really like having peripheral vision.  
  
Malfoy makes a face like he cannot believe how profoundly incorrect Harry is, but he’s not _quite_ rude enough to disagree openly. Harry’s not sure why, since Draco has been very rude in a number of ways already and one more won’t change much.  
  
“Since Draco clearly won’t introduce us,” Greengrass says in her sweet and serene voice, although the look she casts at Draco isn’t very kind, “I’m Daphne Greengrass. I’ll be a first year this year. These are Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle --”  
  
Her introduction is polite and rehearsed. Harry does remember both of the Greengrass sisters having very polished manners in the future -- he just doesn’t remember them beginning this young. But then, he’s not sure he’d have noticed when he was really eleven, to be fair.  
  
“Pleased to meet you,” Harry says by reflex, because it’s that kind of introduction, and then he realises it will be supremely awkward if he doesn’t respond in kind. “Harry Potter.”  
  
Her eyebrows rise up, but Malfoy says, “Oh, I’d heard he was -- that is, you were -- on the train somewhere.” He slumps into the seat opposite Harry, setting his limbs in a dramatic sprawl.  
  
“Had you?” Harry says, wondering. It wouldn’t be hard to guess that he might be, of course. Harry’s birth date is well known, so it’s easy for someone to figure out what year he’ll begin at Hogwarts if they spend a few moments thinking about it.  
  
“Obviously,” drawls Malfoy. He sticks out his hand. “Draco Malfoy,” he offers.  
  
Harry looks at his hand for a long, single second. He dearly wants to withhold his hand. But it seems absurd to refuse to shake on the basis of an in-principle dislike of somebody who has, technically, never really even spoken to him before.  
  
Malfoy’s a rude brat, but he hasn’t actually done anything to Harry. It would seem... extremely weird.  
  
He shakes. Draco Malfoy’s hand is unfairly warm when Harry’s hands are still freezing. The boy flexes his fingers when he withdraws his hand, looking down at them for a second too long. Too cold still, Harry suspects. The train station was... difficult for him.  
  
Greengrass shoulders past Goyle in the doorway and settles into the seat next to him, and then Crabbe and Goyle arrange themselves like hulking bookends next to the entry to the compartment. Beneath them, the idling train finally begins to move.  
  
Malfoy leans forward.  
  
“So, Potter, do you have --”  
  
“ _Draco,_ ” hisses Greengrass.  
  
Harry almost snorts. It would upset Malfoy greatly to know that in this very situation Ron Weasley asked much the same thing. Harry reminds himself that Draco is eleven and cannot be taken too seriously, and he raises one hand and brushes his fringe aside.  
  
Draco looks -- Harry isn't sure what that expression is. It's tight, but it's not upset. He eyes the mark warily. "And the Dark Lord--"  
  
"After he'd murdered both my parents," Harry says, softly and not very nicely, without letting his eyes drop from Draco's, "yeah."  
  
Draco blinks. It's less of a reaction than Harry expects, and he reminds himself that this Draco Malfoy, at least, is not yet actually a Death Eater.  
  
“Hmm,” says Greengrass, forgetting herself and peering closer. “You know, I expected it to be bigger.”  
  
Harry doesn't know what to say to that. He lets his fringe fall back into place and slumps back into the seat.  
  
The train ride seems to go on forever -- and that's before they even make it out of bloody London. Draco isn’t like his adult counterpart exactly, but a lot of the bones are there -- his character is already fixed as one of the most self-aggrandising and spoilt brats Harry’s ever known. From an adult perspective, that’s...  
  
Well, it’s not that Draco is more tolerable exactly, but time and experience have taught Harry how to be more tolerant. He’s experienced a great many deeply unplesaant things, and the eleven year old nuisance of Draco Malfoy does not even hold a candle to most of them.  
  
Malfoy talks relentlessly and only pauses to ask questions, usually of Greengrass, when some nascent social instinct lights up inside his brain and he realises he has to let other people talk too if he wants them to pretend to listen to him. It means that any conversation centres firmly upon Draco, which is presumably exactly what he wants.  
  
His conversation lingers on the opinions of his father, which is even more grating. Harry resents that. Lucius Malfoy is utterly undeserving of such admiration from anyone.  
  
If Harry’s paying attention, it’s exhausting. He spends the first ten minutes uncomfortably wondering if it’ll be worth it to go out and take his chances with accidentally attracting the attention of one of the lingering dead things on the train.  
  
...although, honestly, he’s enjoying the relative peace. Draco is irritating, yes -- but over time Harry’s skin’s warming up again. He feels less shaky and unsteady and sick away from the shades of the dead.  
  
After the first ten minutes of listening to Malfoy’s oblivious and childish prattle, though, Harry picks up the rhythm of the chatter and proceeds to make vague agreeing noises unless asked specific questions. He barely hears whatever Malfoy is actually telling him.  
  
Malfoy is probably clever enough to catch on to this tactic -- Harry knows exactly how smart he can be when he’s backed into a corner, after all -- but he’s also so self-centred he’s not likely to stop and wonder whether or not someone is paying him the slightest bit of real attention.  
  
Greengrass gives Harry a couple of narrow-eyed glances, but she never directly calls him on it.  
  
“I suppose you’re expecting Gryffindor, aren’t you, Potter?” she drawls pointedly. She raises her eyebrows in an expression of polite inquiry.  
  
Malfoy’s mouth is already open again but he pauses and waits for Harry to respond.  
  
Harry thinks about it. He’ll choose Gryffindor again in a heartbeat, of course, but if the Hat doesn’t want him there it might still try to put him elsewhere -- and Harry is keeping a great many secrets and sneaking around a _lot_ lately.  
  
And... broadly speaking, any plan whose cornerstone is “go back in time for extremely rare, Dark magical reagents” ... well, such a plan might rightly be regarded as a bit ambitious.  
  
He frowns, struck by the sudden and unwelcome thought that he might well be sorted into Slytherin. One train ride might be survivable, but spending actual years in a dorm with Malfoy is...  
  
Merlin, _Snape_ ’d be his Head of House. It’s a catastrophe waiting to happen. “Erm,” he says, wrong-footed by the very idea. “I think so, but you don’t really know until you get there.”  
  
If the Hat refuses to give him Gryffindor, he decides, he’s going to beg for Hufflepuff. He doesn’t particularly want to be a Hufflepuff, either, mind, but -- at least Hufflepuffs aren’t Slytherins.  
  
Malfoy makes a face. “I can’t imagine being sorted into Gryffindor,” he says, looking like it’s a fate worse than any he can even contemplate. “I think I’d get back on the train."  
  
Daphne Greengrass turns her head slowly stares right at him until he shifts in his seat and adds, “...no offence.”  
  
“None taken,” says Harry, and doesn’t add any of the things he’s actually thinking, like: _Gryffindor wouldn’t have you, don’t worry, Malfoy,_ or perhaps, _if we stick you in a tower with the twins you won’t last a week._  
  
“Well, good,” says Malfoy after a pause. And then, because he excels at being grating even when he isn’t specifically determined to drive Harry insane, he goes on, “I don’t know why anyone would want--”  
  
“At least,” Greengrass says over him, “we can all agree that it’d be the height of bad taste to be sorted into Hufflepuff.”  
  
“Merlin, yes,” Malfoy agrees, “can you imagine? I suppose Ravenclaw wouldn’t be too bad,” he adds without much enthusiasm.  
  
Harry makes a vague hum of agreement -- Ravenclaw wouldn’t be too bad, no, but Harry will never be put there. It’s the least likely place for him and he knows it.  
  
The train ride continues in this vein. Greengrass evinces an inexplicable desire to save the conversation from ruin, although her efforts must be exhausting, because Malfoy never shuts up about things he clearly views as very impressive. He interjects 'well, my father’, with such regularity that even though Harry is at best half listening, he still can’t help but twitch every time it’s said.  
  
Lucius is a coward and a toady, and the fact that he’s tall and striking and rich and passably competent at a lot of the things he turns his hand to just makes him _that much worse._ Even if that man, probably by accident, has any sensible opinions, well -- just knowing Lucius believes something is enough to make Harry reconsider his position on it. The least Draco Malfoy could do is --  
  
Harry scowls out at the green fields racing past -- some with attendant dead people, because of course there are, even though they left the city behind some time ago -- and then turns abruptly back to Malfoy.  
  
“What about your mother?” he asks, too sharply and loudly, interrupting Draco’s diatribe on Lucius bloody Malfoy’s thoughts regarding the restriction of brooms to second years and above.  
  
Malfoy looks momentarily affronted by being interrupted, and then he just looks confused. “What?”  
  
There’s a moment’s silence, and Harry almost lets it go on until someone else breaks it, so sick is he of hearing Draco’s childish voice lauding his father’s opinions.  
  
“Your mother,” Harry clarifies. “She was with you when I first saw you in Malkin’s, wasn’t she? She seemed nice. What does she think?”  
  
There is very little about Narcissa Malfoy that ‘seems nice’, except perhaps by comparison, but Harry doesn’t think a little fudging the truth will hurt.  
  
Malfoy blinks at him. His eyes are large and grey and he seems very young, which tempers how annoying he is a little bit every time Harry thinks it. “Mother..? She _is_ nice, of course,” he shrugs. “She thinks that it’s poor form not to allow students to bring their own brooms just because the muggleborns all need lessons.” He sniffs. “She says there’s a good deal too much catering to _that kind_ when the school ought to be focusing on teaching magic to _wizards_ \-- and witches, obviously,” he adds, glancing at Greengrass, who tips her head toward him. “I must say I agree.”  
  
Of course Malfoy agrees, Harry thinks darkly. She’s his mother, and he’s eleven. And, of course, purebloods are almost universally homeschooled. Where would he even be exposed to other opinions so he could know what to disagree _with_?  
  
Narcissa is also wrong, of course, if this is indeed her opinion and not just an expression of Draco Malfoy’s petulance at not being allowed his broom. It’s not just the muggleborns who need lessons. Hermione doesn’t like flying at all, but she’s still miles better on a broom than Neville’s ever been.  
  
He doesn’t broach that topic -- it’s not Harry’s job to educate Malfoy, thank god, just to make it through the train ride with him.  
   
Harry doesn’t make it through the whole train ride. When he feels as though he can no longer stand this proximity to Malfoy, Harry gets up and leaves -- even the dead are better company than one more repetition of ‘My Father’ from the other boy.  
  
“I’m going to,” he pauses, and then he gives up and just finishes with, “see the rest of the train.”  
  
Malfoy gives him a puzzled look and Greengrass’s eyebrow twitches, but he moves past them and into the walkway, and the sound of the compartment door rolling closed behind him sounds like freedom.  
  
Harry will take his chances with the dead. Malfoy is _obnoxious_.


	18. Chapter 18

Harry walks through the train between compartments, feeling the rock and sway of it under his feet as it speeds along. The compartments are full of noise, and many of them have their doors hanging open so he can see and hear the school children inside them all talking loudly -- there are more than a few technically-illegal-outside-of-school spells which he sees here and there, and at least once an enchanted paper crane zooms past his ear. It is not very aerodynamic.   
  
However, there are quiet patches -- spots between closed compartment doors, or even the precarious, open walkways between carriages. He hovers at one of these for a few seconds, breathing deeply. Outside he can see the countryside flying past. The Express goes a lot faster than he suspects a muggle steam train might. He can see people out there in places, dead things from all eras moving blindly around.   
  
For now, Harry has the leisure to actually look at them -- even if he attracts them with his attention, the train passes before they can do more than jerk their ghostly heads up and focus their suddenly-sharp eyes on him.   
  
“Excuse me, but you’re standing in the way.”  
  
Harry blinks. He would know that tone anywhere. The voice is higher and more childish, but even in her mid thirties, Hermione still takes _exactly_ that tone with people when she’s trying to be patient but really thinks they should know better.   
  
His guts lurch and Harry turns to look at her. She’s a tiny thing, already in her new uniform robes, dwarfed by her enormous wealth of dark hair. Her teeth are-- Harry’d forgotten, but now he sees her and remembers vividly. Her teeth are _like that_ , front teeth too big and too protruding, until at least third year -- or fourth?   
  
No, Harry remembers now: Malfoy, his stupid 'POTTER STINKS’ badges, and an argument outside the potions corridor. Those badges had definitely been fourth year, right during the Triwizard Tournament, and --   
  
“Excuse me?” Hermione repeats through those very teeth. She taps her foot impatiently and props her hands on her hips. As she ages, Harry knows Hermione will come to understand she can catch more flies with honey, so to speak -- but patience for other people is never something she has an excess of.   
  
“Sorry,” says Harry belatedly, stepping aside so she can squeeze past. “I was a million miles away. Go ahead.”  
  
“That’s all right,” she says with a bemusing air of magnanimity. “You’ve better manners than _some_ people on this train.” She sniffs, and Harry wonders for an odd moment if she has somehow already met Malfoy.   
  
But no, that’s not it -- only Harry’s been exposed to Malfoy’s excess of personality this morning, it seems. “There were some people up the other end, running all up and down the carriage and acting very childishly--”  
  
Probably, Harry thinks with some irony even as he tunes out the rest of her complaint, because they _are children_. But he doesn’t interrupt.  
  
At eleven, Hermione can talk a great deal if left without interruption.  
  
“--Anyway,” she finishes finally, flushed as though she’s only just realising how very much she’s been talking -- complaining -- in the last few moments, “I’m Hermione Granger. And you are..?”  
  
“Harry Potter,” he says, and as with all muggle borns, there’s a lot less awkwardness.   
  
“Are you really?” she asks, peering more closely at him. Her response is a lot more curiosity than awe. “I know all about you, of course -- I got a few extra books for background reading.”  
  
She lists them blithely, angling her head to try to get a better look at his forehead.   
  
Harry licks his teeth. “I wonder who their sources were,” he says with what is probably an obviously contrived air of nonchalance -- but Hermione is a child, and won’t know him well enough to tell the difference. “I mean, nobody who was actually there for--” he waves his hand toward his scar, “is really available to comment, are they? And certainly nobody ever asked me.”  
  
Hermione’s face clouds over, and her fingers twitch like she wants to dive into her trunk for her copy of _Great Wizarding Events of the Twentieth Century_ to investigate its references, and then possibly to demand an annotated bibliography from the publishers.  
  
“Well,” she says, unhappily, “I suppose a lot of those books rely on news reports and interviews with neighbours, that sort of thing.” She looks scandalised by the very thought that she might not be able to learn the true course of events from a book.   
  
“I’m sure they got the basics right,” Harry says, feeling a little bit guilty, but -- well, anybody could tell her not to rely on journalism in the wizarding world. Or... many things in the wizarding world, if he’s honest. Sometimes it’s a wonder to Harry that the wizarding world functions at all.   
  
She still looks put out.   
  
“I’m looking for a new compartment. Did you want to try to find one with me?”  
  
He’s not surprised to find her pleased to be asked.   
  
“Yes, please.” She holds up her book like it might defend her, and he catches a glimpse of _1001 Magical Herbs and Funghi_. At least Hermione’ll be very well prepared -- and just in time for Snape to ignore and belittle her all year, he thinks cynically. “The people I was sitting with earlier were making it very hard to get any reading done.”  
  
Running around making nuisances of themselves like children, yes, Harry remembers. He also doesn’t doubt that Hermione tried to make them stop and got teased and laughed out of her compartment.   
  
“The boy I was sitting with wouldn’t stop telling me about his dad’s opinions on things,” Harry says, a little cruelly, and then since he’s being mean anyway he goes on: “I guess his dad’s meant to be important or something -- I wouldn’t know.”  
  
Hermione purses her lips and shakes her had. “I wouldn’t know either. I’m the first witch in my family at all.” She pauses. “It was ever such a surprise when we found out! A good surprise, of course.”  
  
Harry nods. “I didn’t know either,” he admits. “I told them they had the wrong person.”  
  
That much he recalls vividly -- himself, hunched before Hagrid’s enormous bulk in that freezing and gloomy shack out on the sea, repeating ‘I cant be,’ and ‘But I’m just Harry,’ even in the face of what was really, increasingly overwhelming evidence.   
  
He decides against trying to tell Hermione how furious his aunt and uncle were, or how Vernon threatened Hagrid with a gun. Besides, he remembers suddenly, none of that happened. Not here. In this timeline, Hagrid and the Dursleys never even met.  
  
Harry wonders how they’re getting on without him -- but not for long.   
  
He wrenches himself back into order. “Bit of a shock, that.”  
  
Hermione frowns. “Wait, but you’re--” She stops.   
  
“My mother was a muggleborn, like you. I lived with her family, and they... never really mentioned it.”  
  
Hermione looks annoyed. “None of the books said anything about that!” she complains. And then, belatedly, her brow furrows intensely and she adds: “And I think that’s very irresponsible of them not to tell you.”  
  
Harry inwardly rather thinks that the Dursleys have forgotten more than he’s ever known about their responsibilities to children in their care, but externally he just gives an awkward shrug.   
  
They find a compartment with space for them, away from Malfoy and rowdy students respectively, although it is closer to one of the dead things haunting the train than Harry would like. But if he focuses all his attention on Hermione, all he feels is the lingering cold of their presence. It could certainly be worse -- and it’s a fair compromise for not having to deal with Malfoy.   
  
Talking to Hermione for the rest of the journey reassures Harry that it’s actually Malfoy who’s unbearable and not eleven year olds in general, which had been a real concern for a moment there. This isn’t to say that talking to Hermione is easy, because it’s not. She’s wildly enthusiastic about proving to everybody she encounters that she’s smarter than they are, which marries very awkwardly to her present circumstances -- that is, being a muggleborn experiencing the magical world for the first time.   
  
She also talks unmercifully fast, like she just knows someone is waiting in the wings to cut her off and _must_ get everything out all at once.   
  
Harry misses his Hermione powerfully. It seems unfair that he can miss her so much when she’s sitting right in front of him, but he guesses that’s time travel for you.  
  
Harry has given up a lot in coming to this time. He wonders a lot if the sacrifice is worth it, but he knows he’ll have to fix himself to find that out. It’s not something he can take back, anyway. A person can travel back in time -- far back, even -- but they tend only to move forward at a rate of one second per second and no faster.   
  
“Gryffindor does seem like the best one,” he agrees when she brings it up. “Wasn’t Dumbledore a Gryffindor?”  
  
“Yes!” She says, alight with excitement, “It says that in the most recent edition of Hogwarts: A History -- have you read it, then?”  
  
Harry shakes his head. He knows that there’s a new copy published every decade, edited by a committee who decides what parts of the school’s recent history ought to be included. The only reason Harry even knows about this is because Hermione was on the committee after the second war -- in fact, he remembers getting the distinct impression that she may have been the committee.   
  
He can’t tell this Hermione that, of course, but he thinks the Hermione in front of him would be overjoyed to learn that about her future self.   
  
The train ride passes more agreeably with Hermione than it had with Malfoy, despite the nagging cold and the whispers of the dead, and even though he has to redirect Hermione twice when she seems likely to dive into her trunk to grab a reference text. Malfoy’s just that unbearable, he guesses.   
  
Hogsmeade station is awash with dead things.   
  
Harry balks at the exit, but another student yells behind him and with a shove he stumbles down from the train and into the wintry embrace of a score of swollen hands and murmuring voices that nobody else even notices.   
  
Dazed with confusion and swallowed by the sudden movement of all the students and all of the old dead things all around, Harry meets the eyes of an ancient woman with a purpling ring around her neck and a blackened face.   
  
Icy hands grab him and her eyes draw him in, drag him down, roll him under like an ocean wave: cold, huge and irresistible.   
  
The real world drops away. Everything is darkness and ice and mumuring voices--  
  
“Harry!”   
  
Hermione’s hands burn like brands on his arm. He gasps. It’s like surfacing for air after diving too deep.  His lungs fill, and the air is so cold it stings.   
  
He turns to her but inwardly he is panicking. The dead are all around, and Hermione looks at best mildly alarmed -- by Harry, not by the shades. He wraps his fingers around hers and squeezes with all the strength in his tiny child’s body, like by clinging harder he can absorb some of her living warmth.   
  
Focusing on Hermione makes the dead less real. Their touches are present but not solid, their bodies slightly less tangible.   
  
Harry exhales, and although it isn’t a cold evening his breath steams in the air. It’s not the cold outside -- it’s inside him, making him sick and shaky.   
  
“First years,” bellows Hagrid over the crowd.   
  
Hermione blinks. “Are you okay? You’re so cold -- and you look faint .”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, and he forces himself to let go of her warm hand. If his grip isn’t hurting her then the cold must at least be uncomfortable for her. “Come on, there’s Hagrid--”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Hagrid,” Harry repeats, and barrels through the crowd -- alive and dead. He can’t easily tell the difference so he treats everyone  like they’re not there, and gets a few squawked protests for it. He can hear the tinkle of ice hitting the stones beneath him and he’s glad that the dusk is dark enough that Hermione doesn’t seem to have noticed it gathering on him.   
  
“Oh,” says Hermione, when she finally sees who Harry means. “Er...”  
  
Harry doesn’t respond to her aborted commentary on the sheer size of Hagrid. He flexes his fingers self-consciously, wondering if he should feel pathetic about clinging to the hand of an eleven year old girl for comfort. He wonders if that’s taking advantage. She’s eleven, for heaven’s sakes.  
  
They head for the boats under Hagrid’s direction. Harry ignores the dead with a desperation that comes straight from fear. The fear is icy and thick and it sits heavily in his guts. More than one dead and terrible thing reaches for Harry as they walk and he almost tramples a young Susan Bones in trying to avoid them.   
  
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, steadying her with one hand. She’s boiling under his fingers. No wonder he feels sick.  
  
She takes a moment to get her balance. “No harm done. Are you all right? You don’t look well.”  
  
“Erm. Trains. Don’t agree with me,” he lies, and she clicks her tongue sympathetically but quickly becomes distracted by her friend.   
  
“Harry,” Hermione says quietly, “are you really all right? If you need to stop and sit down --”  
  
If Harry stops walking more of the dead will catch up. They’ll surround him. The last thing he wants is to stop. If anything, he should _run_. “I’m fine,” he repeats, and tugs her gently -- faster, he thinks. They must go faster. She seems perplexed, but comes gamely.  
  
The boats are a blessing. He can feel the chill of the drowned dead but none of them make it to the surface of the lake. He sits next to Hermione and across from Parkinson and Lavender Brown, and he tries to breathe without shaking.


	19. Chapter 19

He feels cold but less sick when they finally make it to the castle. There are shades at the doors but it’s no worse than Diagon Alley.  
  
Harry knows that Hogwarts has ghosts, and also that the ghosts do not in any way account for all the people who have died on the grounds at some point. He is guiltily glad he never visited once his affliction came in, in his previous time line. The Battle of Hogwarts might have resulted in a lot of familiar, upsetting shades...  
  
Hogwarts has not changed in essentials. Despite the damage of the battle there, which lingers in Harry’s memory and falls like a veil over this reality too, he feels like he knows every crack and flagstone and mumbling suit of armour personally. Stepping into the castle is like coming home, more than any single moment he’s ever spent in Privet Drive or Grimmauld Place. In that moment, he knows that returning here is the right choice now -- maybe the only choice he could possibly have made.  
  
He crosses the castle’s threshold in a daze. All roads, he thinks, light-headed, will lead him back to Hogwarts eventually.  
  
He breathes out. His eyes flutter helplessly. For half a second, he relaxes.  
  
A cold dead hand reaches out for him, because of course it does.  
  
He un-relaxes immediately. Harry is not relaxed. The flagstones are hard and solid under his feet, clattering with the echoes of many children’s steps. Harry focuses on the warmth of Hermione standing right next to him, small and strange but undeniably alive and human.  
  
Professor McGonagall looks noticeably younger, which is a strange thought. She always seems to be in a sort of nebulous ‘old but not infirm’ age bracket to Harry, and the last time he saw her he could have sworn she hadn’t aged a day since he was eleven -- but here, now, the differences are clear. There’s less silver in her hair and the lines of her face are softer -- and, now that he is looking for it, he understands how much weight McGonagall must have lost during the last war, and how much she never managed to put back on.  
  
Her eyes drift over the assembled children and pause only for a half second when they skim him. He only notices at all because he’s watching her for it. Her eyes linger, too, on Neville, and he wonders if that’s only because Neville is (exactly as Harry remembers, his memory did not exaggerate on this point in the slightest) a dishevelled disaster zone. His cloak pin is somewhere around his ear, caught in his hair, and he's clutching Trevor for dear life. Harry leans slightly to the left and catches a glimpse of his face, where he is wearing an expression that puts Harry in mind of a bunny confronted by a cobra. This is enough to make McGonagall's gaze linger judgmentally all on its own, of course, but he can't help but notice that it's only Harry and Neville her eyes seem to seek out in the crowd.

Harry tries not to think about it.  
  
The dead in the entry hall are milling, indistinct. They stay that way while Harry focuses on the living, so he clings to the idea of Hermione standing next to him while McGonagall speaks. It’s hard to focus on both things at once, but he’s pretty sure he knows what his old professor is saying.  
  
She finishes and he notices mostly because the noise of the other children rises when she goes.  
  
Then he hears it.

 _“Forgive and forget, I say. We ought to --”_  
  
Harry can hear the ghost’s voice clear across the room even before all the children notice them and go quiet. It rings like a bell in his head, thrumming and vibratory, a sympathetic frequency in his bones. His whole body lights up with it.

His head turns toward them like a weather vane, drawn unerringly on a current in the air.  
  
The Hogwarts ghosts, all the pearly-white mass of them, a score or more in total, _freeze_.

They are not still like living things are still -- they do not shake, they do not breathe, their hair and clothes are not caught in stray air movements. They are still, like stone, and all the more otherworldly for it.  
  
All of them turn to look at Harry as one, in a terrible, spine-shivering shift of concerted movement. He feels Hermione shift uncertainly on her feet next to him.

Harry can hear his own heart. It's so loud he's surprised nobody else is looking for the source of that strange organic thumping. He's surprised it's not shaking the walls.  
  
_Oh no_ , he thinks.  
  
The ghosts, too, make a series of uncomfortable shifts and twitches, like a sudden and abrupt shudder through their ranks, more obvious for their stillness.  
  
And then, as one, they _scatter._  
  
A chill passes through the crowd, commented on by more than one child, and then there’s n trace of them. Not a one.  
  
“Is that...” Hermione whispers, “Erm, is that... usual?”  
  
Harry shakes his head -- then remembers he’s not meant to know. He shrugs as well. “I’ve no idea.”  
  
Then McGonagall  returns. If she notices the confusion of the gathered children doesn’t comment on it.  
  
Harry follows the other children into the great hall. He notices that not a single ghost is present. He chooses to ignore that.  
  
Now that Harry’s actually here, surrounded by surreal and tiny versions of his friends again, he feels unaccountably nervous. It’s all... simultaneously happening too fast, too immediate and real and close, and very like moving through cold molasses -- slow motion, out of time, strange and dreamlike.  
  
Harry’s awareness of what’s going on around him and the passage of time seems to jolt and erk; now fast and now crawling by. It seems he goes from (mostly not) listening to McGonagall’s dull introduction to suddenly being called up to the Sorting Hat with zero experience of the intervening time.  
  
Hermione has gone before and been sorted into Gryffindor with what seemed -- even more to Harry now, as an adult -- like a great deal of arguing with the Hat. He remembers it, of course he does, but it nevertheless seems like time passes the blink of a camera shutter.  
  
It dilates absurdly now, as he approaches the stool, and every step seems like it takes a geological age to pass.  
  
Then he is there, sitting with the Sorting Hat over his messy hair, with the quiet sounds of the other students echoing all around in the large hall. He can hear every restless shuffle and clink -- and the whispers, too.  
  
The Sorting Hat tips over Harry’s eyes, dark and dusty. He blinks. He wonders again if illegal and fundamentally selfish time-travelling is enough to get him dumped into Slytherin. He is keeping secrets, he is performing strange, dark magic -- and there’s not, he thinks, a lot that is more Slytherin than secrets and dark magic.  
  
“Be that as it may, Mr Potter,” the Hat tells him in that small voice that itches inside his head, which he has never quite managed to forget, “flinging oneself recklessly through space and time with a half-baked plan that hinges upon smuggling components -- which may or may not have existed -- out of the world’s most infamous prison... is not what I would usually regard as a particularly cunning scheme.”  
  
Harry twitches. He’s never really thought of it like that.  
  
“But ambitious -- perhaps.”  
  
When the Hat puts it like this, Harry feels weirdly confronted by the sheer magnitude of his choices.  
  
“As well you might,” suggested the Hat, not very gently. “It doesn’t matter, anyway -- I’m by no means designed to Sort grown adults, but you, Mr Potter, are such a one that I should not hesitate.”  
  
Harry feels peculiarly as though this is sort of harsh -- he isn’t that much of a Gryffindor stereotype. What about all the secret dark magic?  
  
But more than that, he sags in relief. He isn’t going to Slytherin house -- and he isn’t going to have to hear from Draco Malfoy every day. He feels like he’s ready to face nearly anything else. Even, perhaps, Quirrell.  
  
He waits for the ragged Sorting Hat to call out his house. It hesitates, and he tenses.  
  
“They say a word to the wise is sufficient, Mr Potter -- so I shall have to give you three, I should think, at least: embrace your _strengths_.”  
  
Then, before Harry can even begin to question this: “ ** _GRYFFINDOR_** ,” the Hat bellows.  
  
The Hall erupts into raucous cheers and clapping.  
  
“Mr Potter,” McGonagall prompts him impatiently, and Harry jerks back to his feet. The Gryffindor table is loudest, which is not necessarily a reflection of his popularity. The Gryffindor table is almost always the loudest. They are loud people.  
  
He slides in next to Hermione, ignoring the way everyone’s eyes are on him -- living and dead.  
  
He barely notices when he’s taking his seat, because all he’s  On his other side, looking at him with very wide eyes indeed, is Percy Weasley.  
  
The Percy Harry remembers still views him as ‘ _my mad little brother’s mad friend one time he broke out of Gringotts riding a dragon_ ’. This is a thought Harry believes he has all at once, in one run-on and incoherent sentence. The breaking out of Gringotts, while perhaps overshadowed by Harry’s other ‘achievements’ in other people’s estimations, has always seemed the absolute nadir of social behaviour in Percy’s mind, and Harry gets the impression that he thinks of it with dull horror and a sort of low-burning, very grudging admiration.  
  
“Percival Weasley,” says this strange new (old) version, all earnest expression and overlong limbs, and offers Harry his hand.  
  
It’s a bit surreal to encounter him now, fifteen, so young _and_ so inclined toward a belief in Harry’s basic respectability.  
  
“Oh, er... pleased to meet you,” he says, and gamely shakes Percy’s hand. He doesn’t think eleven year olds are required to shake hands very often, but ten he barely remembers actually being eleven -- hard to say.  
  
Ron joins them all at the Gryffindor table shortly, sliding into a seat across from Harry to the loud cheers of his brothers. His smile is both relieved and proud, stark in his heavily freckled face. Harry musters the effort of polite attention to watch the remainder of the Sortings. What he actually wants to do is turn to Ron immediately, of course, and find out what kind of weird novelty it’ll be to meet him again as a kid. He looks small -- despite being taller than Harry by a fair margin -- and young and unfinished, all angles and bones and joints yet.  
  
Harry eyes him in his peripheral vision while he claps inattentively at Blaise Zabini’s spectacularly unsurprising Sorting into Slytherin.  
  
There is a pause while Dumbledore gets to his feet with his long hair and beard gleaming in the light of the candles and his clashing robes a riot of confusing colour. When he starts speaking, Harry is impatient to see him get on with it -- but part way through his brief, strange speech, he makes reference to the out of bounds corridor on the third floor.  
  
A cold anxious knot in Harry’s guts melts and disperses at that, because it is acknowledgement that his theft of the stone has not been noticed.  
  
Yet, anyway.  
  
... _Probably_.  
  
It occurs to Harry that Dumbledore is very capable of pretending, of course.  
  
Harry’s not sure what benefit that would be to him, or to anyone. He furrows his brow. Since pretty much everyone else is also looking at Dumbledore in confusion during this speech, it doesn’t seem out of place.  
  
‘Embrace your strengths’, had been the Sorting Hat’s cryptic suggestion. That Hat's a bit barmy, but Harry's never had it steer him wrong before -- and it's saved his life, at least once.  
  
Trying to puzzle out all the many fragmented possibilities of Dumbledore’s wheels-within-wheels thought processes is not one of Harry’s strengths.  
  
Luckily, the feast begins before Harry can get too tangled up in that, and then it turns out that he doesn’t even have to try to begin a conversation with Ron, because Ron does it as soon as that intentionally baffling start of term speech is concluded.  
  
Ron leans over, completely disregarding that someone else is asking for him to pass the gravy, and says: “So are you really him, then? Do you really have --” he waves vaguely at his own forehead “-- you know?”  
  
It’s not _less_ graceful than Draco Malfoy’s questioning on the train, although from the noise Percy makes he’s pretty sure he, at least, knows it’s rude to ask strangers to show you heir scars. Harry draws his hair away from his forehead, showing off the mark for a second, and then lets it fall again -- mostly he just wants to get it out of the way.  
  
Ron’s eyes widen as they fall on it, and Harry notices that although Percy makes a sound a little like a stepped-on cat when Ron asks, he isn’t very reserved about twisting in his seat to see the scar for himself.  
  
It’s Seamus, on Ron’s other side, who leans even closer, throwing his shadow over Ron’s, to ask eagerly: “Do you remember it _?_ What was he like?”  
  
At this, Harry does kind of balk. He can’t remember how much of this sort of thing he actually used to put up with -- now, as an adult, his story is remarkably well known, and documented extensively if not necessarily honestly (the Prophet being what it is, after all). He’s been able to either point people toward history books (Hermione’s chapter in the Revised 20th Century History of Magical Britain being by far the best, obviously) or just give a non-answer and change the subject for more than a decade.  
  
Now, he blinks at Seamus over the steaming, savoury-scented roast between them on the table. Several responses come to mind. He isn’t sure which to make.  
  
His hesitation costs him the opportunity to respond at all, because Hermione says, “Well, _really_ ,” in a tone of utmost offence, and Percy says, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate line of questioning -- you should _both_ know better than to pester him like that.”  
  
And so Harry, who apparently doesn’t need to think of what to say on this at all, just says loudly, “Sorry, are those mint humbugs?”  
  
There’s a pause.  
  
It is not his most graceful change of subject.  
  
After a second, Ron passes him the dish of them with a frown, as though he too can’t quite figure out what they’re doing on the table. “Looks like,” he agrees.  
  
Harry takes one of them out of a sense of obligation, and then he’s holding a mint humbug and Ron is still watching him, so he puts it in his mouth.  
  
Peppermint and boiled sugar burst on his tongue, cooling and sweet. It is absolutely a mint humbug. Does this mean they’re actually muggle lollies and their presence at the feast is just a nod to Dumbledore’s odd sweet tooth, or are they actually a wizarding thing that the muggles just assume are mundane -- like the owls?  
  
He puts the dish of them down gingerly, cracks his boiled sweet between his molars, and then serves himself some potatoes. He ignores the eyes he can feel on him -- living and dead.  
  
“So,” Percy says, in his Prefect Voice, “which classes are you all looking forward to?”  
  
And although Ron makes a noise like he can’t believe how uncool and boring his brother is, the question has Hermione’s immediate and unreserved attention. Harry, on the other hand, applies himself instead to his food. Although he’s been eating more regularly than he ever did at the Dursleys’, it’s still a novelty to have good, proper hot food. The Hogwarts elves always do a spectacular job, too, so Harry indulges himself and just communes with the feast for a while. It’s a lot better than the service station sandwiches he’s been having lately.  
  
“Potter,” someone prompts him eventually, and he looks up from his lamb to find it’s Percy again, watching him with a bemused expression. “Any questions?” And there’s the Prefect Voice again.  
  
“No,” says Harry, and then, wondering if this is perhaps an odd response from a new student in a historical, sprawling, magical castle, he adds, “I don’t even think I know enough to have questions yet.”  
  
He can’t even think what he might have asked once upon a time.  
  
Hermoine leans forward again to see past Harry and ask, “Yes, actually, who’s that teacher up at the table? With the turban?”  
  
“Oh,” says Percy, following her gesture. “That’s Professor Quirrell. The turban is... new,” he adds thoughtfully, brow furrowing.  
  
Harry glances up, sees Quirrell staring at him over Snape’s shoulder, and feels the stab of pain in his head when their eyes meet. It startles him. His forkk scrapes across his plate with an unpleasant _shiink_.  
  
“Sorry,” he says, before anyone can even comment. “Hand slipped.”  
  
“Quite alright, Harry,” Percy says magnanimously, as though he is the arbiter of what’s alright and what’s not. Harry sees Ron roll his eyes. “That man he’s talking to,” he adds, tapping his fingertip upon the table next to his golden plate, “that’s Professor Snape. As first years, I should tell you -- er, that is, you should know -- that he’s... known to be strict.”  
  
“Fred says he’s a --”  
  
“Ron!” Percy barks preemptively, which is a bit of a disappointment -- Harry sort of wants to know what Fred might have said about Snape to his brother behind closed doors. The twins are... creative.  
  
“Yes, well,” Percy say, flustered, then, “he favours his own House -- that’s Slytherin -- and he’s very strict with the others, and you’ll want to mind yourselves with him.”  
  
And then he doesn’t say anything else about Snape, and gives Ron a very dire look when it seems as though he might open his mouth again.  
  
“That doesn’t sound very professional,” Hermione says disapprovingly.  
  
_You don’t know the half of it_ , Harry thinks.  
  
For a moment he feels simultaneously overwhelmed by grief and nearly unbearably fond of the lot of them all at once -- a feeling he never thought he’d have about bloody Percy. He takes a deep breath, shoves a buttery brussels sprout into his mouth, and waits for the feeling to pass. It will eventually, he knows.  
  
The feast passes like this: it is warm and the candle light is ruddy and welcoming and gleams off the golden cutlery. The food is good and hot, made by the eager elves working below. The hall is full of the cheerful sounds of children’s chatter.  
  
There are dead things, here and there. Harry is busy picking out old faces, so young and strange in the crowd of students, and he pays them very little attention. Those dead things remain strange and unsightly shapes glimpsed at the edges of his vision.  
  
He hears when Alicia says, further down the table, “Don’t the ghosts usually come down to meet the new firsties?” and he ignores her wilfully and dismisses th pang of nervousness the question causes.  
  
The feast is fine. Good, even. He thinks that if Hogwarts is going to be like this, maybe he doesn’t need to search so hard for a cure immediately. Perhaps this, here at the castle, is sustainable.  
  
Harry follows the other Gryffindors up to the tower that evening, passing by the warmly decorated common room of red and gold and sturdy brown wood with its welcoming fire, and he crawls into bed in his new dorm with a belly full of good food and a mind equally full of optimistic thoughts.  
  
Perhaps this will be okay, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Edit 21/03/18 - I want to ask that you please do not use this comments section as a forum to express the things you dislike about other people's fics or writing. I am sure my readers understand why a responsible fic writer would want to discourage this behaviour in our community.
> 
> Thanks for reading this note and respecting my request.


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